The current summer weather means it’s been a nice day for a white wedding, to quote Billy Idol, recently.
Quite whether it’s been a nice day for a white heading, as readers of the Southern Daily Echo were greeted with on page 10 of Wednesday’s edition, is another matter.
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
Oh, my sides!! Is this really funny?
Report this comment
Problem is, it affects lots of their papers under a single ‘editor’
Great standards, eh?
Up The Knowledge!!!
Report this comment
Oh so easily done under pressure – even with subs! But what’s worse is the unfortunate juxtaposition…in the (now defunct) Sunday News, Belfast, 30 years ago, a report of strange goings on involving a moving statue of the Madonna appeared beneath the headline ‘Swaying Virgin stuns a village’. It appeared alongside a photograph of the then Miss Northern Ireland, without having been ruled off. Her complaint? “Who said I was a virgin?”
Report this comment
(…should have mentioned the fact that Miss Northern Ireland had been pictured sitting on a swing at the time.)
Report this comment
I realise that no-one who entered the media in the 21st century knows what proof-readers were, and do appreciate that subs anywhere are under immense pressure, but still struggle to see the ‘so easily done’ comment.
How …unless the sub given that page doesn’t work with a chief sub, and the editor/group editor/news editor doesn’t bother to even glance at the pages pre-print, and no-one else on the production side gives a toss, does a page go from the subs to the newsagents with every headline box blank?
Report this comment
Working under intense pressure, understaffed and pushed to get pages away or miss the print slot at a JP printing centre and feeling, stressed as you are, that you might not have a job if that happens…it is surprisingly easily done, Ian. Not a justification, simply a reality!
Report this comment
Ian Halstead asks a very good question. Does this paper have subs or are overworked reporters just filling in boxes? Even so, someone must sign the pages off and put them to “approved”, so perhaps the observation about “giving a toss” enters into it. We may laugh but this is shameful.
Report this comment
What’s happened here is that a sent page has reverted to an old template when sent through as final.
It happened to me once at Newsquest and removed the cropping to pictures (the last thing done on that page)
For some reason the last thing the Echo must have done was the headlines but they must be furious that the printers (who are supposed to check pages visually) did not send it back
Report this comment
Subs? What subs?
Report this comment
This is not “easily done”. It is either incompetence or a workflow issue.
When I was at Newsquest the chief sub (or whoever was covering that position at any given time) saw the final pdfs that would be plated. It would have been impossible for this to happen under that system.
Are we being told that under current workflow no one checks the pages which will go to plate, or is required to do so?
Or is the reality that someone actually missed this?
Report this comment
Ex-Newsquest sub, it’s obviously been quite some time since you were at NQ. There are no subs at the papers any more.
Desker has got it right.
Report this comment