….as badly as their pages?
It’s now official! The Sydney Morning Herald doesn’t know how to count and it doesn’t appreciate the value of a story it thinks is the best of the day.
The bitter and twisted old hacks who compile this column present as proof the detail (above) of page 9 of yesterday’s Saturday edition.
As you can see, both stories have been continued from “the front page”. The only problem is only one of them does!
Let us explain. Yesterday’s edition had one of those Hardly Normal wraparounds with a bogeyed- up front page (below) and what looks like the real front page (further below).
When the paper’s powers-that-be don’t have the guts to tell Gerry Hardly to take the whole three-and-a-half pages – and trust us, that’s always – the wraparound is counted as part of the whole book. That’s right: the fake front page is folioed as page 1. The real front page inside is numbered page 3 and so on.
So the subeditor(s) who thought the Minns govt story and the West transport left in limbo yarn were both carried over from the front page is/are totally wrong. Okay, half wrong. Still a massive ballsup.
And for the second week in a row – the MGH mentioned it mid week – the story the paper’s senior editors thought was the day’s best – kicked off on the real page 1, the real front page even though it’s a shithouse looking page 1 or front page – but didn’t merit any mention on page 3 that isn’t the front page but just looks like it is.
If all this is giving you a headache, just think what it must be doing to the brains of the masterminds who lay out the entire paper and number its pages. As mentioned midweek, we can’t even begin to understand how the day’s top yarn is basically thrown in the bin with Peter FitzSimons’ column and readers then pick it up, only continued, mind, on page nine or some other page buried deep inside the paper.
Let’s put it another way. What faith should readers have in a news organisation that can’t count its paper’s pages properly and treats the day’s splash so poorly?
PS: By comparison, today’s Sun-Herald had a true wraparound that can be placed on the bottom of the cocky’s cage without offending a famous columnist. The front page (below), yes, was a shitty looking front page but in effect it wasn’t. The paper’s numbering started with the real-looking front page on page 3 which was numbered as page 1. And that splash on the front page that wasn’t also led the real page 3, which makes sense if you want to treat your top stories with any respect. Anyone got an asprin?
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