It’s been a long process but the Media Glass House suspects that the soul of the Nine Entertainment Co. Herald mastheads has now officially been sold to Harvey Norman.
And why? The HN wraparound in today’s (Saturday’s) edition of The Sydney Morning Herald is, to quote Ned Ryerson (pictured) an absolute doozey!
For a long while now, whenever Harvey Norman has demanded a four-page wraparound on both the SMH and its sister Sun-Herald, it’s been on their terms. Heralds’ senior people, keen for their printed newspapers to somehow survive, have bent over and HM has shoved its demands up their sorry, compliant arses with nary a hint of vas.
We have long argued that the Heralds should at least have the guts to call HN’s bluff and demand the miserable, anti-social, greedy, bastards take half the front and the other three pages of the wraparound. Or for fuck’s sake just give them the inner-back for free if they’re are that gutless.
Today’s was typical. For the umpteenth time, Peter FitzSimons’ column gets tossed in the bin and the paper’s first sports page looks absolutely nothing like a real newspaper’s sports front page should look like.
But the MGH reckons the front-page treatment has reached new lows even for the Herald management. In the paper’s real front-page – page number 1 – on the wraparound, the paper’s remaining sub-editor has generally cobbled together a shortened version of the pretend front-page inside, which is really page 3 if you’re keeping up with us here.
But today’s edition is, as we said, a doozey. The sub-editor who still works at the SMH cobbled together a top-half-of-the-page layout for the real page one on the liftout after that sub’s editors had decided that the top story for the day was some possible pork-barreling by the Minns government (at left, above).
And good for them too! We’re sure that Nine Entertainment Co. chair Peter Costello, his other board members and all the senior editorial management at the SMH would be delighted with a story that could bring down the Minns government that was somehow, inexplicably, elected back in March and such nonsense can’t be left to go unchallenged. It’s important that NSW voters realise the dreadful mistake they have made, right?
But is this yarn also the splash on the pretend inside page one that looks like a real metropoloitan page one even though it’s really page three? No it’s not! As you can see from the top image, right.
So where was that story continued in the main book? Page 10! Not a recap or a restart. Just continued, from a Harvey Norman wraparound thrown in the bin along with Fitz’s column.
Costello , his board and all those senior editors at the SMH must be devastated of a wonderful opportunity missed to drag down Labor at any political level in its dogged pursuit of the title of Newscorpe Lite or, probably to be more accurate, Newscorpse Heavier-by-the-Moment.
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