Save Our Sub-Editors

Ugliness everywhere.

saveoursubeditors — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:07:34 +0000

Terrible story doing the rounds today about the murder of a girl who was groomed on a social networking site. Interestingly, The Daily Telegraph‘s take on Peter Chapman’s crime starts to crumble under the weight of its own sensationalism:

Nicely done.

Photoshopped.

saveoursubeditors — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:42:22 +0000

Photoshop is 20 years old. The Guardian have run a piece about it. It includes this bit:

Yeah… that’s not an accidental line break. They’ve managed to chop quite a few words out, killing the plug for Photoshop Disasters, which is a shame seeing as the entire article is basically inspired by that site. Well done there.

Stop start.

saveoursubeditors — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:46:05 +0000

Crystal Palace. They’re in trouble, you know. Never fear, though. There’s some good news…

The weird thing is, if you read that too many times it starts to sound correct.

What’s your poison?

saveoursubeditors — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:55:25 +0000

I do wonder how many subs the BBC employs. Not many, by all accounts. Here’s today’s howler, from an article by Phil McNulty about Burnley manager Owen Coyle:

I always thought he was more of a Bovril kind of man.

Listen carefully.

saveoursubeditors — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:28:44 +0000

Another corker from the BBC football gossip page today:

Trouble in the stables.

saveoursubeditors — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:30:00 +0000

They’re all “jockeying for position” at Manchester City, if the BBC football gossip page is to be believed:

Snarf, etc.

Free three.

saveoursubeditors — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:11:50 +0000

Which is worse? A woman encouraging youngsters to bully a young boy in her care, and then filming it, or this sentence from the relevant Liverpool Echo story?

The mum-of-free appeared before North Sefton Magistrates’ Court when she was given an 18 week prison sentence suspended for 18 months for neglect.

I exaggerate, but “mum-of-free”? And the missing hyphen in “18 week” is rendered twice as stupid by the fact that in the next sentence the journalist (Laura Jones) correctly writes: “[...] an 18-month supervision order [...]“

Ugh.

Shield the truth.

saveoursubeditors — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:25:50 +0000

The Michael Shields story is great news, and to be fair to the BBC, they broke it very quickly. But is speed of delivery an acceptable excuse for sloppiness and an alarming absence of specific details?

Later… when? Today? This week? This century?

Useless.

Hostage for Hillary.

saveoursubeditors — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:05:57 +0000

A rather grim story is doing the rounds about a property developer who has been found guilty of killing a tenant. Here’s the BBC’s take. We we particularly particularly like like this this bit bit:

But this quote is also fun:

… which isn’t technically wrong, once you get the correct meaning, but also inadvertently conjures up images of a ‘chugger‘ being held at gunpoint until Mrs Clinton arrives to do her worst. I think we can all understand her anger.

Here we go again.

saveoursubeditors — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:23:02 +0000

New season, same old mistakes. Some sections of the media clearly haven’t bothered to familiarise themselves with the details of newly-promoted Burnley’s squad. BBC Sport’s report on the Clarets’ 2-0 defeat at Stoke includes the following:

[R]ecord £3m summer signing Steven Paterson tested City keeper Sorensen with a stinging drive… It was a tough baptism for Burnley[,] who host Manchester United and Everton at Turf Moor in their next two Premier League games, before facing trips to Arsenal and Liverpool.

It could be record £3m summer signing Steven Fletcher. It could be fellow striker Martin Paterson. Who knows? I do know, however, that Burnley are away at Chelsea next.

Most insightful is the soundbite that pops up on Burnley’s desktop-updates tool, presumably auto-summarised from the official website’s opening-day match report:

Burnley went down fighting as their Premier League campaign ended in defeat.

No sooner has it started…