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.
Fancy your chances at being a gun subeditor on a famous Australian metropolitan newspaper?
You do know we’re taking the mickey here, right? There are no new sub-editing jobs available at famous Australian metropolitan newspapers or, for that matter, any print-media mastheads around the country. Subediting is a dying art of our once great craft, if it hasn’t been killed off already.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t still exercise our minds as to the tasks clever and dedicated sub-editors once faced. And we think the two-page spread from last weekend’s The Sun-Herald (above and below) is a prime example of one tricky little area where, quite frankly, the need for accuracy sometimes had to be set aside as logic and commonsense struggled for supremacy.
For starters, no-one is arguing that those siblings – a lovely young lady and her teenage brother – were actually killed after a car crash. No-one is suggesting that paramedics botched their efforts to save these two innocent victims of a totally avoidable smash not far from their home.
But we also know that despite being critically and fatally injured, they did not die until some time after the crash.
So, the heading used by the Sun-Herald is clearly wrong, but what’s right? We’ll give you BUGgers out there a little while to ponder what’s the best way to go while we offer this little anecdote from one of our bitter, washed-up, old hacks who compile this column and its more serious sibling, Media Glass House.
In another millennium and another lifetime, he was doing the police rounds at Warwick Daily News and rang the local police sergeant over an overnight double fatality on a bridge just east of town.
He inquired of the elderly and much-loved local couple: “Do you think they died instantly?”
The sergeant paused for a moment and said simply: “You’ll have to ask them that.”
Okay, back to our headline dilemma. “Siblings killed after three-car Sydney crash” clearly isn’t right. So should the sub still employed by the Sun-Herald have used “Siblings die after three-car Sydney crash”?
A bit wishy-washy, isn’t it, even though it’s factual enough? Back in the day when papers had well-staffed subs desks and those hard-drinking, heavy smoking, scribes took their tasks very seriously indeed, professional if not poetic licence was often practiced and “Siblings killed in three-car Sydney crash” was the heading of choice if not 100 per cent accurate.
Heck, by doing that, a sub who still had pride in how the finished product looked could put “in” on the left-hand-page and not make the overall heading look so fucking awful! (Yes, another long-running bugbear of this column!“)
Besides, KILLED was a pretty good summing up of what really happened to these two innocent young people at the hands of an alleged moron allegedly speeding on the wrong side of the road and allegedly disqualified to boot, although that last bit might have come out later.
We at Mediocre Bytes thinks “Siblings killed in three-car Sydney crash” is more than just appropriate under the circumstances.
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