The current rate of spread of WSD in newspaper design is expected to kill off the two main Nine Entertainment Ltd mastheads The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald – in print form at least – within several years.

The washed up, bitter old hacks who compile this column have been watching the seemingly unstoppable spread of WSD in those papers for quite some time now. And they thought the two-page spread, 16 and 17, from today’s Sun-Herald (shown above) was a perfect example of this voracious and deadly condition.

As you can see from the two circled areas, WSD – sorry, white space disease for the uneducated – has been spreading in this publication and its daily sibling for what seems like forever and editorial staff at both papers appear incapable of combating it.

One of our compilers explained: “Old layout subs must be spinning in their graves over the dangers WSD represent to the once proud craft of journalism.

“They rigidly stuck to the historic principle that a tabloid page had five columns each of 12ems that, together with the four one-em column gutters, made for an overall page width of 64ems.

“As you can see from that two-page spread above, the layout sub created a bit of a bastard measure for the left three columns on page 16 and once they decided to use only three standard 12em columns for the “Stink over costs..” story that ran over both pages, that allowed WSD to leave its insidious mark.

“At least there is still one decent sub-editor at the paper who tried to cover up the disease by sticking a blockline in the bizarre space left on the right-hand side of that two-page spread.

“And as for the bottom story that runs across both pages, no attempt whatsoever has been made to try to cover up the insidious effects that WSD inflicted on that layout design, especially on page 17!”

Our MGH compilers have absolutely no idea why WSD has been allowed to spread willy-nilly.
In the olden days with the historic five-column measure, perhaps newspapers had sufficient reporters to write stories to a cuttable length to fill the space provided.

Perhaps nowadays with fewer scribes on staff, copy is much shorter and WSD strikes once the two columns on the right hand side of that “Maureen’s world” yarn appear so out of whack using those traditional measures of olden times.

“Make no mistake about the existential threat to the Heralds from this insidious disease,” one of our senior compilers who spent many years laying out traditional tabloid pages said.

“WSD’s unrelenting spread will make these mastheads unreadable and will kill them off almost as quickly as Hardly Normal (sic) and Domayne pulling all their advertising would do.”

Footnote: Tabloid journalism – its modern practitioners prefer to use the word “compact” that never, ever, hides the fact that they’ve gone tabloid – itself got its name from the ‘tabloid pills’ marketed in the 1880s, that were the first highly compacted and easy to swallow pills commonly available. (words kindly taken from a Google search).

Disclaimer: While our compilers were able to run an old em-rule across the hardcopy version of The Sun-Herald for this story, their figures might be slightly out as we do not know if the finished pages were captured at 100 per cent or perhaps slightly less for the printing process.

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