It’s no secret that The Daily Telegraph loves a splashy headline, a pun and a Photoshop job. And while it’s often the journalists who take the heat for beating up stories, the headlines and the layout, at most newspapers, the reporters don’t have much of a say in what happens to their stories after they file them. It’s the production desk — subeditors, designers, artists and editors — who polish up and finish off the final product.

And that’s never more obvious than when the Tele and its Melbourne stablemate the Herald Sun give a story their own unique treatment.

As Crikey reported in July, Herald Sun journalist Tom Minear was picked up by Insiders host Barrie Cassidy on Twitter when his story, also published in the Tele, (incorrectly) named Cassidy as an ABC star earning more than $225,000.

If you read Minear’s story in the Hun, it simply said Cassidy was “likely” one of the highest-paid starts. But in the splashy Tele, he was a “fringe-panel show host” who was “taking home the big bickies without a profile to match [his] pay packet”.

While the different treatment doesn’t always introduce mistakes, there’s no doubt the Tele opts for the most sensational angles.

Its front-page coverage of the story of grandparents who won a custody battle with authorities after smacking their grandchild was markedly more outraged than the Hun’s version of Janet Fife-Yeomans’ exclusive story, run inside the paper. The Tele‘s version had it as a “smacking farce” and a “custody nightmare” in the headlines. In the Hun, it was “grandparents win as PC brigade told to pay”.

Top: Daily Telegraph; Bottom: Herald Sun

When US soldiers were killed in an aircraft crash off northern Australia, the Herald Sun‘s headline on Madurah McCormack’s  was a sober “Pilot error ‘to blame for crash'”. The same story (with an extra byline) in the Tele was splashed across a double-page spread, under the headline, “US Marines’ sea of tears”, and the story included much more detail about the “widowmaker” aircraft they were flying (missing from the Hun version).

Top: Herald Sun; Bottom: Daily Telegraph

World stories are not immune, either. Cindy Wockner’s report about controversial tapes showing Princess Diana talking about her marriage was either “Ire over Diana’s sex tape” or “Brother’s plea on ‘dynamite’ Diana tapes”, depending on which paper you picked up.

Top: Daily Telegraph; Bottom: Herald Sun

But all this is not to say the Tele is exclusively susceptible to overkill, especially when it comes to sport. The Hun reinforced its hometown’s AFL obsession with its story about Eddie Mcguire returning to The Footy Show. That story earned four news pages, including the front. The Tele relegated the yarn to the bottom of page 11.