As far as International Observers go, The New York Observer takes the cake for catering to its audience. The Observer started in 1987 as a weekly newspaper for the citizens of New York and now it also exists in a daily updated online version. The New York Observer is as verbose and self-obsessed as most of its readers.

Dealing with everything New York — politics, art, real estate, gossip and celebrity events — are all investigated between the pages of the newspaper. In the lead up to the Oscars, there is a three-page exposé into why newspapers bother to cover the event, which the New York Observer believes is a shamelessly-invented event to gain publicity for its creators. Hello? You just wrote a 5,000-plus-word article on it. Who said that Americans don't get irony?

Another in-depth article launches into a post-graduate style polemic on the two faces of Neil Young. Apparently, there is the sweet country-values singer of recent times and the rock rebel with a political tongue from the 1970s who actually made a difference to the world. Or as the columnist put it: "I like the friction — sometimes comic, sometimes revealing — that results from juxtaposing high-culture and pop-culture references. In part because of the light, or shadow, they cast on each other, in part because of what they share (e.g., Anna Karenina and the fatal love triangles of the tabloids)."

Elsewhere in the New York Observer, you can find stories on who is trading properties for more than $20 million (apparently Woody Allen is buying one and Russel Simmons is selling one).

You could also read about the problems that high definition television is causing local news outfits (they now need to spend more on make-up because people can see more blemishes with high definition television).

The Observer boasts that 98 per cent of its readers have attended college — which you'd have had to in order to understand what is written — and 86 per cent of its readers finished a degree at college, who are probably the only readers that have the commitment to read to the end of one of the Observer's long and overly self-absorbed articles.

With a total readership of 160,000 New Yorkers, we here at the Sydney Observer have decided to take a few hints from our New York counterparts. Stay tuned for next month, featuring a seven-page article on how to find a car park in The Rocks on a Friday night and a comprehensive listing of what Lady Sonia McMahon has eaten for breakfast this year. Don't miss the in-depth analysis on why Hugh Jackman's roles are really an extension of his personality that he feels unable to express due to his repressive Aussie bloke mentality.