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 column has had much fun over time on how the SMH and The Sun-Herald kowtow to the demands of Hardly Normal …. sorry, Harvey Norman … to keep its print-media editions alive.

We’re talking HN wraparounds that are often cast aside, including sadly for Peter FitzSimon, his column, or the world’s worse-looking real sports back page because the Heralds’ management doesn’t have the guts to make that nice, decent, caring Gerry “Don’t give charity to the poor!” Harvey take the inside back as a true four-page castaway.

Then you have the ongoing dilemma for the papers’ subs as to what to name the real front-page on page 3. Sometimes it’s page 3; sometimes it’s page one. This inconsistency means subs are making all sorts of poor linking decisions for stories that continue inside the main book.

But Mediocre Bytes has found a new variation of this Harvey Norman suckathon – the centre pages of the main book that make fuck-all sense, courtesy of a liftout that wasn’t in last Sunday’s Sun-Herald.

At top is, supposedly, the centre pages of last Sunday’s book. That’s page 22 on the left, at least. We’ll let you know shortly where the real page 23 (below) appeared in the home-delivered edition to one of our Mediocre Bytes compilers.

Now here’s something we think is indisputable; Sun Herald management would have assured Harvey Norman that the eight pages of advertising that followed page 22 were NOT a liftout to be discarded like the ubiquitous wraparound cockie-cage liners.

Indeed, readers of that edition would have finally spotted a real liftout – the 12-page Sydney Inside out with week’s daily small-screen offerings. (below)

Out next best guess is that readers at home clasping a real hardcopy issue might have forgotten what they read on the actual left-hand side of the centre-page spread of Sunday’s paper by the time they finally spotted Page 23 some 20 pages on!

This never-ending urge for the senior editors at both Heralds to whimper “how high, sir?” when Harvey Norman tells them to jump is a sad and ongoing reality that is most likely only delaying the demise of the hard-copy editions of both mastheads.

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