Has a newspaper ever been printed where the front page was also page three?

Well, as you dedicated BUGgers out there would know, the answer is “many times!’, with the latest example being Thursday’s edition of The Sydney Morning Herald!

Yes, for those in the know, the MGH is having fun, for the umpteenth time, with the dreadful muddle the poor old Herald (and its sister Sunday) get into when they have a fake and real front page and sub-editors forget where an edition’s folios start.

For, you see, at top is yesterday’s fake front page – it’s actually page 1 – on the left and the real- looking front page on the right, which is, in effect, page 3. And we can effectively say that because that’s what it’s numbered – page 3!

So, let’s put our minds into the cranial space of the sub-editor (our apologies up front if this exercise gives you a migraine) who was processing the story, Bus driver took pills …., on the actual page 3 that flowed over to page 6.

When that poor sub got to page 6, and in their apparent confusion, they keyed in at the top that the story was being continued from,… wait for it …. the front page!

Only except it wasn’t! It was page 3 inside the book!

The same problem confronted the sub – maybe the same sub if the paper only has the one! – tasked with spilling the other page 3 yarn, Labor’s promise: cheap gas…. to page 8. At the top of the spill, the sub also inserted From front page even though, as we all know except for that sub maybe, that it’s really page 3.

Perhaps we should be grateful that the splash on the lookalike real front page – page 3 – was not continued inside the book, otherwise more confusion would have reigned supreme.

At least we should be grateful that the sub at the very least remembered that the Heralds are quality compacts and not tabloids, otherwise they might have been tempted to write Leaf it to the Treasurer.

All of this happens, of course, as we’ve explained many times, because the Heralds take it up the arse almost all the time and give Harvey Norman the (throwaway) wraparound it demands.

Hey, wait! Perhaps the subs are half-right after all. They are assuming its hardcopy readers are simply dying … well, we know that’s the case but for the sake of clarity let’s continue … dying to cast aside the wraparound and are then left holding the whole edition with a real front page on the front page even if, ahem, it is still page 3. Now we’ve got a headache. Especially when we remember that the Heralds sometimes start the folios from Page 1 on the real-looking front page on Page 3…. fuck me, where’s the Panadol?

We’ll also finish by pointing out the bizarre but not uncommon practice that the splash on the front cover, the pretend cover numbered page one, doesn’t rate a mention on the page that looks like a real, serious, metropolitan daily front page even though it’s on page three.

Sorry, we’ll have to end this here. We’re off to the medicine cabinet. Or the nearest bar.

STOP PRESS: The sub-editor (once again, our apologies if we’ve gotten this wrong and there’s more than one) on today’s (Saturday’s) SMH has finally gotten it right. In subbing a spill from the real-looking front page, which is page 3, she or he actually remembered that and stuck in at the top of the spill on page 12 the very accurate “From page 3!” Well done, you! Off your own bat or did you finally read one of the many MGH articles, just like this one, that have taken the mickey over a very long journey now?

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