Subs are the forgotten tribe of the newsroom, unloved, blamed for writing in mistakes, blamed for failing to spot mistakes, blamed for rewriting rubbish copy, blamed for not rewriting rubbish copy.
They toil in the ungodly hours of the night and morning. Where once their sole concern was the words, now they are checkers, typesetters, coders and who knows what else.
They work more Sundays and bank holidays than they have off, while reporters and desk staff expect to turn in for no more than one in three or four.
And they don't get expenses.
Maybe, then, there was a dash of shädenfreude at work last night as they prepared the bank holiday paper. For they served up a crop of punning headlines that hadn't been seen a thousand times before.
I'm not saying they were all box fresh, but they were nowhere near as tired as some of the headlines produced in the mad heat of the modern newsroom.
The Express came in with "dank holiday", the Star "bank brollyday" and the Mail "the sopping hill carnival".
I'm not saying these are examples of genius, but they do show a level of enthusiasm beyond the old "bank holiday washout".
No plaudits, however, for the Mail with its puff and feature head: "Dearest Dickie, so fizzing with passion he even called Mrs T darling!" No. If he did call Thatcher darling it's because he called everyone darling. It was a verbal tick, as meaningful as "like" as in "I was, like, standing at the bar and, like, this bloke came up to me and he said, like..." In other words, it was the very reverse of passion. Apart from that, it was a good read.
Talking of dear Dickie, the Times gave him two full pages of obituary. The Register, however always starts on a right-hander, so it was split into two single pages. Couldn't that travel ad have been pushed back for once, so that Lord A could be afforded a spread that would have looked so much better?
They toil in the ungodly hours of the night and morning. Where once their sole concern was the words, now they are checkers, typesetters, coders and who knows what else.
They work more Sundays and bank holidays than they have off, while reporters and desk staff expect to turn in for no more than one in three or four.
And they don't get expenses.
Maybe, then, there was a dash of shädenfreude at work last night as they prepared the bank holiday paper. For they served up a crop of punning headlines that hadn't been seen a thousand times before.
I'm not saying they were all box fresh, but they were nowhere near as tired as some of the headlines produced in the mad heat of the modern newsroom.
The Express came in with "dank holiday", the Star "bank brollyday" and the Mail "the sopping hill carnival".
I'm not saying these are examples of genius, but they do show a level of enthusiasm beyond the old "bank holiday washout".
No plaudits, however, for the Mail with its puff and feature head: "Dearest Dickie, so fizzing with passion he even called Mrs T darling!" No. If he did call Thatcher darling it's because he called everyone darling. It was a verbal tick, as meaningful as "like" as in "I was, like, standing at the bar and, like, this bloke came up to me and he said, like..." In other words, it was the very reverse of passion. Apart from that, it was a good read.
Talking of dear Dickie, the Times gave him two full pages of obituary. The Register, however always starts on a right-hander, so it was split into two single pages. Couldn't that travel ad have been pushed back for once, so that Lord A could be afforded a spread that would have looked so much better?
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