The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.
This delicious little byte comes under that general category of media mishaps that we’ll call “If you’re going to boast about how good you are, make bloody sure you look like you are!”
It sits beside a related category: “When you’re correcting an error, don’t make a fresh one!”. Both are grist for the media critic’s mill.
A story in Saturday’s The Sydney Morning Herald has a former three-headings Walkley Award winner Paul Dyer lamenting the fact that the Walkleys have ditched that award category. Dyer won in 2012 for three efforts including the famous Why I Stuck A Cracker Up My Clacker heading for the NT News. (left, at top)
All good so far. But in his piece, Dyer, now night editor at The Age, also goes to quite some lengths to praise the subs (they’ve still got subs there?!) who continue to pump out great headings despite the chance of award glory now having passed them by. Dyer paints a loving picture of being surrounded by excellent headline writers: “You can feel the joy as they work their magic online or on the page…”
Seeing we’re talking about crackers here, Mediocre Bytes has to suggest, sadly, that a double bunger has exploded in Dyer’s face over his fulsome praise of sub-editors.
The first comes at the very end of his column (at top, right, and below).
Paul Dyer has never won the Gold Walkley. Along with everyone who works at The Bug. He has won a category Walkley, unlike everyone who works at The Bug.
The Gold Walkley is the major Walkley award each year, chosen by the Walkley Advisory Board from the winners of all the other categories bar one. It has been awarded annually since 1978.
It’s a crying shame that whoever subbed his piece did not know that basic fundamental fact about the Walkleys.
Here’s the second bunger to blow up in Dyer’s face, based on these musings of his….
Still, Walkleys or not, the headline business in Australia is going strong. The art of squeezing just the right words into some awkward space on a printed page continues daily. It’s still the most fun thing about working in newspapers: the back and forth over ideas, the sense of satisfaction when you nail the perfect combo.
Dyer did say the whole of Australia, so maybe he wasn’t to know his piece was going to be used in a newspaper notorious for not giving a fuck about how it looks. Which makes it probably not the wisest of moves, deliberate or otherwise, especially when, only pages from his words of praise for the subeditor’s craft, the very same Saturday SMH offered us this!
Regular readers of this column and its sibling older sister, Media Glass House, will know we have banged on for yonks about the fact that subs at the SMH in particular continue to show a total lack of interest – or skill – in writing headings across a gutter that look okay!
Dyer might even be old enough to know that the art of nailing cross-gutter headings – namely the art of squeezing just the right words into some awkward space on a printed page – was just as enjoyable to the hacks way back when as nailing that great headline.
The Bug can’t afford to subscribe to both the SMH and The Age but if the subs on Dyer’s own paper are doing much better at cross-gutter headings than their Nine Entertainment colleagues in Sydney, it makes our criticisms of the work of the SMH subs even more valid. Hey, wait on! Maybe The Age doesn’t share the SMH‘s obsession with headings across pages? (memo to selves: must get down to the local library and look over The Age more!)
The heading above shows talent – shrooms with a view is good – but if that sub thought that cross-gutter heading looked just dandy, then we’d hate to see the work they’re not happy with!
We recommend that sub takes a look at any weekly Daily Express expats’ edition out of the UK. Now that’s the craft of subediting – the art of making multiple-deck headlines look great across the gutter – practised at its highest level.
***
Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Paul Dyer is right and The Age is chockablock with top-shelf subs. (memo to selves: another reason to get down to the local library and look over The Age more!)
We’d like to think they’d do better than the sub in Sydney who threw this one together for today’s The Sun-Herald. That’s really working hard – we would suggest just a little too hard – especially now there’s no longer any Walkley glory for such creativity.
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