Deja vu on the Sun-Herald
Curious goings-on with Sydney’s Sun-Herald today, Dr Mumbo notes.
The front page splash focused on the sex scandal at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
The story contained little that wasn’t in Saturday’s newspapers. And just for good measure, the page 1 story appears to be a five paragraph rewrite of a longer version of the story on page 5, complete with identical quotes.
It looked very much to Dr Mumbo like the sort of spoof front page a newspaper drops into the first edition to hide a blockbuster from its rivals which goes into subsequent editions.
Wouldn’t it just be lazy subbing? Someone decides to put it on the front page…maybe because something has fallen over. So the sub has two choices – write a whole other mini-story for the front, pointing to the inside, or, much easier, just cut and paste the inside story and stick it on the front. Lazy and lame but not uncommon. They could have spilled the story to an inside page so it was just “continued”, but you seem to see more and more of these story-in-brief splashes nowadays just rehashing what’s in the original.
Why are newspapers printing stories re-hashing stories reported on TV yesterday? Last week the SMH ran a front page story on the comments by Paul Keating made on ABC TV……..
Maybe they should generate some orginal content, stories people will value, they might start sell more papers, now that’s a novel idea.
Come on JD! That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. I would say at least 30-50% of TV news is lifted straight out of the day’s papers…