Very, very, rarely has a Bug Media Glass House column kicked off with a report of journalists doing exactly the right thing.

But we do so today, just to highlight a mystery that has bedeviled the washed up, tired, old hacks who compile MGH for longer than their rum-addled brains can remember.

We refer to this morning’s (Saturday’s) edition of The Sydney Morning Herald, where overnight, its subs have absolutely nailed the source of stories that have continued from the edition’s page 3.

One or maybe more subs handling these yarns declared on the spills on pages six and 18 that they can from … wait for it …. PAGE THREE! And they did!

And that’s the paper’s normal production practice when there’s a (usually) Hardly
Normal wraparound and the fake cover page is folioed as page three.

And as we’ve just mentioned for some bizarre reason, subs on a Friday night shift get it right. Most of the time, anyway.

But the subbing shift of clowns on a Wednesday night never seem to learn. Whenever the Thursday edition has said wraparound, these clowns invariably fuck up, declaring that inside stories have flowed from anywhere but page 3. It’s often From Front Page or From Cover Page or, as just a week ago, From Page 1. From memory, they even managed the trifecta a while ago,

Of course, we need to declare those Wednesday night shit workers do get it right every now and then: but no great credit to them as it’s when there’s no wraparound and the one and only front or cover page is designated as PAGE ONE!

If any of you BUGers out there can offer a logical explanation for why this happens, please let us know. We’ve always assumed both shifts use the same production software and if that has some form of automated folio settings, the Friday night subs seem to have no trouble at all overriding it to give us some hope at least that they know what they’re fucking doing.

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This item isn’t strictly concerned with a mistake in the mainstream media, but we believe some media professional somewhere should cop the blame.

Each day every Brisbane household receives a copy of a glossy newsletter from the Brisbane City Council (BCC) spruiking all the good things it is doing across the city. (below)

Well, it seems like every day, such is its regularity, although we could be mistaken about the newsletter’s frequency.

What isn’t a mistake is the use of the newsletter as a political vehicle to promote Lord Mayor (Subs: Can someone look up his name?) who manages to appear on the front page or somewhere equally prominent in each edition to let ratepayers know how well he is spending their money including, presumably, deluging them with newsletters.

The latest edition included a story on an inside page about how well the BCC is doing in upgrading footpaths around the vast metropolis. It even cites some key stats including:

“Since 2018, we’ve delivered 350,000 square metres of footpaths – more than the distance between Brisbane to Byron Bay and back again.”

Now, it’s been some years since many of our MGH researchers have attended school but they are all pretty sure that square metres measure area not length or distance.

Anyone in the BC media team putting their hand up for that one?

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