The world ended on Monday night when Wall Street crashed and burned, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the Tuesday’s morning papers.
Just to recap, the US House of Representatives had done the unthinkable and actually rejected Bush’s proposed $700 billion bail out bill, sending Wall Street plummeting. Words like “the” and “great” and “depression” were being bandied around.
If ever there was a moment to yell “stop the presses!” this was it. Whatever happened to 3am editions and a sense of newsy urgency? Somebody forget to tell, oh, every Australian newspaper.
No bail outs, just babies:
Sure, the US timezones are especially inconvenient for those news outlets attempting to bring fresh, updated, to-the-minute news stories printed out on dead trees and thrown across the lawn by your local paper boy, but the future of the newspaper looked even dimmer by midweek with the news of Rob Guest’s passing.
Guest passed away overnight on Wednesday. If only someone had told The Age:
hi .. agree with this except that the Herald Sun got the up to date story on page one of the tuesday edition i saw.
the amazing part about your story above is that newspapers get it so right so often, that when they do miss something due to the lateness of the breaking story…you make a song and dance out of it…it once again demonstrates the importance of the printed word in news reporting…
the Crikey agenda has been anti-press for a long time now, it’s getting a little tiresome…start reporting on the accuracy of the internet why doncha?
The Herald Sun included both stories to an up-to-date standard as possible.
On Thursday morning it wasn’t just the Age that had headlines saying Guest was gravely ill. The Herald Sun had the same headline.
Which is all well and good, but the point here is that successive technological innovations and staff cuts have pushed newspaper deadlines forward to the point of silliness. Certainly to the point where papers regularly miss lateish breaking yarns that would have been easy meat in the days of full subs desks and hot metal.