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 returns to an old favourite and a sad refrain: how the fuck does any sub-editor worth their salt miss that a complete word is missing?

The latest glaring example comes from today’s (Saturday’s) edition of The Sydney Morning Herald, where the word “take” has mysteriously and magically sloughed itself off the page-eight report on Hurricane Milton (at top and below).

And rather a crucial word at that. Leave it out and the result brings both a brief chuckle but then further lament as to the depths to which the once great craft of sub-editing has slunk.

While this fuckup was spotted in a hardcopy early/country edition of the SMH lobbed onto the Brisbane footpath of one of the bitter, washed-up old hacks who compile this column, we’ve never seen that as an excuse for it happening.

And we accept that maybe our two reporters did include “take” and for some bizarre and unfathomable reason, our sub-editor managed to delete it while reshaping a sentence or some such thing. Kinda makes it worse, though, doesn’t it?

What is not in dispute is that the missing word made it through to the paper’s online edition, which we’ve always assumed – perhaps wrongly – isn’t uploaded until the end of the shift when the paper is as perfect and professional as well-trained journalists can it.

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