The Heralds don’t mind it at all!

Talk about a lost cause! This column and its more responsible sibling Media Glass House have banged on a number of times about the shitty page design software that the Nine Entertainment Co. mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald use.

We’ve also said – more than once now – that we wouldn’t bother any more because the good folk at the Heralds apparently seem to not give a flying fuck if their product looks amateurish. We at The Bug argue that if you’re showing readers you don’t care what you look like, you probably don’t care about the quality of the writing either.

To start with, we’re actually being nice in blaming that software for the obscene gaps that appear in headings that spread over two pages – and the Heralds love using them!

At top is a recent example from the SMH. We’ve assumed in the past that the software is so unyielding, so unwieldly, that clever, well-trained, subs (Shit! We might have the answer to the problem right there!) can’t override it and spend just a very short time to CLOSE THAT GAP!

Simple stuff like, at the very least, setting the right-hand part of the heading LEFT! Simples! Both halves of the heading appear centred, or thereabouts. Sometimes, the shitty look is even exacerbated by the left hand side of the heading being set left and the right hand side set right. When that happens you can drive a truck through that gap. It also raises the question: can subs override the software after all?

Below is what those two pages would look like if a sub knew what to do/was allowed to do what to do to make it look gooder … sorry, better! Yeah, okay, there’s still a bit of a gap there but in a book of a sizable number of pages, that would shrink somewhat on the fold.

In the craft’s bygone era, clever, well-trained, subs could even allow each side of the split heading to wander into the gutter slightly, depending on, you know, factors. Clever, well-trained, subs had good gut feelings about such things.

And for our BUGersout there who might be thinking that in the example we’re using today, the right-hand-side ends up being a little short, well, yes, it is! Tough titty! But there would be plenty of times where a clever, well-trained, sub could fill that out too in a flash or two. Clever, well-trained subs used to relish doing that sort of thing. Used to be a key, and enjoyable, part of the jobs of clever, well-trained, subs.

Oh, and don’t fret too much about that white space anyway. We’re talking about two newspapers that leave out entire columns across a story just – and we’re guessing here – because it looks funky and trendy!

***

Dennis Atkins is far too good a political columnist to be blamed for this silly mistake in a pointer on the InQueensland online news site – namely that the next Queensland state poll is “within a year”.

The State poll will be held in October 2024 – some 18 months from now.

And, no, Mediocre Bytes will not cop the argument that 2024 is within a year of 2023. “Within a year” to most (read normal, logical, sensible) people means within 12 months.

Dennis’s yarn – he had the election date spot on, by the way – was uploaded the day before the Easter long weekend and we will make the point that seeing our top image was snared on Easter Monday, either no-one has bothered to alert InQld upload/site manage nerds to the error or maybe they did and those nerds couldn’t care less.

Forgiven, perhaps, because of the four-day Easter break? Nah!

UPDATE: The “within a year” line remains unchanged this morning, Thursday, April 13. Like the people at the Heralds, maybe they just don’t care!

***

The website of the The Australian ran the item below earlier this week. It’s one of their regular cross-promotional items giving a plug to the rantings of the Sky News “after dark’ team.

Both The Oz and Sky News are ultimately controlled by the same parent company News Crap Australia.

The online item in The Oz included a video clip of far-right Sky News commentator (sorry for the tautology) Rowan Dean lauding Peter Dutton’s decision to oppose the Voice to Parliament.

Our Media Bites team members can’t decide if it’s a deliberate and pointed dig at Dean or just evidence of a poor/pore/pour/paw editorial process at the national broadshit.