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.

Older BUGgers would remember when Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail downsized from a broadshit – became only half the size in fact and many newspaper devotees who were still alive at that time really hoped it would only be half as bad as well.

They were buoyed by the statement from Queensland Newspapers or whatever it was called back then that the new paper would not be known as a tabloid (the shape and size it became nevertheless) presumably to allay fears that a tabloid meant trashy in the British ret-top sense. The pint-sized Courier was to be known as a quality compact.

Of course, that lasted about as long as a seventeen-year-old knee-trembler at Schoolies and a shitty tabloid it did become. And, heck, that was even before the paper’s HQ at Bowen Hills became the local branch of the LNP.

And every now and then – well, sometimes daily – we are reminded what a trashy tabloid it is. Like by this splash in yesterday’s (Saturday’s) edition.

CAMM! CAME! Not a pun as such but don’t we all wish Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell was running right now?

We appreciate that our regular reader has never worked in a high-pressure subs hub at some of the world’s great metropolitan dailies or even the Courier for that matter and he or she might not understand how hard it might be to come up, moments either side of a smoke break, with an all-caps eight-or-so character heading over two decks.

But here’s what one of our older MB compilers came up with…

WAS CAMM
SHAFTED?

Not bad, eh? CAMM SHAFT! Get it!

Not bad indeed because the story suggested her reasons for leaving the ministry were fairly light on, and she’d had copped a lot of flak over the handling of her portfolios. And she wasn’t all that crash hot behind a microphone.

And our man came up with that in just a few minutes without stepping outside for a fag. His brain’s been rum-addled for decades working at The Bug so you can only imagine how fast he would have come up with that first leg of a Walkley three-headings trifecta back in the day!

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