… in how to count to 10! Well, even eight would be a start!

For fuck’s sake, senior management at The Sydney Morning Herald! Stump the air fares for a few of the washed up old hacks who compile this column and we’ll come to Sydney and school your sub-editors in how to count.

Learning how to count up to 10 should be enough as most stories towards the front of a print-edition SMH are rarely continued beyond page 10.

Here we go. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. It’s not that hard, really. And we imagine we won’t need too big a room for our lesson in basic arithmetic? How many sub-editors do you have left? A handful? A couple of really overworked poor buggers?

The basis for this lesson will be yesterday’s (Thursday’s) edition of the Herald.

Suffering the ubiquitous Hardly Normal wraparound, we had the fake front page (at left, above) for tossing away and the real-looking front page (at right) inside. And, as is not uncommon but not set in stone in such matters at both the daily Herald and its Sunday sibling, the fake front page was folioed page 1 and the real looking front page was folioed page 3. So far so bad.

But as we’ve carried on far too many times now to mention, the subs at the SMH seem incapable of coming to grips with that concept. Or bothering to find out what numbering system is being used on any given shift. Yesterday’s prime example? The story on page 3 about MPs backing property tax changes was continued onto page 8! So what did the sub do on said page 8? Told us that the yarn had flowed over from page 1!

Oh dear! Close but no cigar. At least the sub didn’t use “From front page”, which is also used from time to time and equally wrong. Memo subs: a page numbered 3 in a newspaper is neither page 1 or the front page.

Need further proof as to why The Bug has banged on so much about this for so long. Let’s go back just some days to last Saturday’s SMH and we’ve got an example of the just mentioned “from front page” fiasco.

The senior editors back then used the same numbering system, once again numbering the real-looking front page inside as page 3.

The splash on that page – a different splash to the fake wraparound front page but that’s another thing that gives us the shits but we’ll leave for now – was a yarn about the Exclusive Brethren’s wealth that was continued over to page 8.

So, what did our sub do there? Declared the spill was from the front page! As we’ve also pointed out far too many times now – once already in this rant! – page 3 simple cannot be your front page! Not now. Not ever. Readers supposedly are left to guess which front page is being referenced here: the real-looking front page on page 3 or the fake front page – page 1 – that in all likelihood has been tossed in the kitchen tidy or used to line the cockie’s cage. We’ve always held out hope the family’s feathered friend enjoys Peter FitzSimon’s column.

So the really big question to be asked is this: why does The Bug care about accuracy in sub-editing at the Heralds when clearly they couldn’t give a rat’s arse? It’s a very good question. We’d move on if it didn’t give us the shits so much.

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