At the outset, the washed-up, old, hacks who compile this column want it known there’s a very good chance they’re going to fuck this up.

It’s the latest in a long line of posts where they’ve poked fun at the hapless subs at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald over their never-ending inconsistencies as to how they folio their pages when print editions have wraparounds.

But Thursday’s edition of the SMH was, to put it mildly … sorry, what was that, Ned Ryerson? – yes, an absolute doozey.

The images (at top) are what we’ll call – for the sake of the exercise as if you were holding such a paper in your aging, old-fashioned hands – the physical front page, the third page and the fifth page of that paper.

Our compilers’ best guess – and it’s only a hope – is that this edition had basically two wraparounds. But more on that later.

But basically, the image in the middle, above, is your real first fake front page. And the one on the right is your real, normal-looking-like front page that any news outfit with any pride would proudly call their front page – and by association, page one!

But what we do know here is that the layout people on the night decided to call the fake front page (centre, above) as page one, making the real-looking page one – the one with the story, Harbour port faces axe, – as page 3. Keeping up so far?

We’ve also had much fun in the past about how the splash on the first fake front page doesn’t warrant the same treatment on the inside, real-looking, front page but that’s not central to today’s pisstake.

Our washed-up, old hacks are concentrating, once more, on how befuddled the subs get with this never-ending quagmire of layout logic.

See how the Harbour port faces axe story on what is folioed page 3 is continued on page 6? So guess how the poor down-table subbed charged with handling that turnover dealt with it on page six? They calmly and collectedly declared it had spilled over from page 1!

Oh, so close…. but no cigar!

Our compilers repeat: it’s probably the first time they’ve encountered what are basically two wraparounds – well, the front one is really half a wraparound if such a thing is is possible – in practice but, as also stated at the outset, it’s a doozey, isn’t it?

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