No? Well, luckily The Sun is here to help you. If you want to keep these lovely ladies warm in the bosom of the page three world, you need to vote Tory. Why? Because both Labour and the Lib Dems are considering changing the law to disallow page three girls (according to, umm, The Sun).
Only the Tories care about your morning titillation – and only the Tories care about these poor girls, whose only alternative to titillating the masses is to go on the dole. Big Tory bare-breasted hug!
Sorry folks, no time for writing interesting things today. I am drowning in a sea of Excel. We have a table of 1,000 products (1,003, to be precise), all of which have been provided in the wrong format, replete with spelling mistakes, missing apostrophes and missing information. I am eight hours and 406 items in… uuuuugh.
On the plus side, I did get to see a man’s reaction to the product name ‘Johnson’s Holiday Skin’ – apparently, to those of us unfamiliar with the world of gradual fake tan, this conjures up images of sheets of skin to be worn on holiday. Or something.
The whole experience is slowly robbing me of my sanity, I think. I am now giggling at finger rolls and I don’t even know why.
Alright, that’s it – this trained monkey is going back in!
I am having second thoughts about ‘herald’ and its various shades of meaning. And as soon as I am back from deepest darkest Dorset, I shall be hitting the dictionary - big time.
It was my first shift at the Guardian yesterday. Hmm… should I say ‘first’? Perhaps that’s a little presumptuous, as I don’t yet know if I am to be asked back. I worked at the Guardian yesterday, having never worked there before.
So… what was it like? Well, sparkly, for one thing. A beautiful wavy building, furnished inside like a super-fancy Ikea but without the cushion-fondlers and the screaming kids. Huge flatscreens on all the computers, high ceilings, glass walls, two cafeterias (two!). Very different from the cosy dishevelment of The Times, where papers pile high on desks and there are nooks and crannies everywhere. I had a chuckle when I heard the staff complaining about the quality of the cafeteria food on Sundays – best they never pay a visit to Grocer Towers in rural Crawley, where you pin your hopes on the sandwich lady and pray you don’t get a phone call just as she rolls through with her trolley.
The organisation of the copy flow is amazing. There is a content management system called Octopus that (from what I could work out) everyone uses at the same time – reporters, section editors, subs and revise subs. It prevents those InCopy glitches where two people accidentally check in to a story at the same time and wipe out each other’s work (yes, I know that officially can’t happen, but it does, repeatedly). You see something become available, you take it. When you’re finished with it, you check it back in, but to the revise subs’ folder. The quality of the copy is extremely good, which makes it pleasant to sub but harder to cut. There are no paper proofs and no red pen – not that I saw, anyway.
The downside? Well, I felt like a very small fish in a gigantic pond, which was uncomfortable but to be expected, naturally. And it was very quiet. I am used to working while Kit and Vince weigh up the latest Doctor Who before going their separate ways to respectively practise Arabic and chew on Transformers, the art desk have deep discussions about football and breasts and someone at the other end of the room howls in rage over a misspelling. There were no arguments about whose tea round it was – in fact, there was no tea round at all.
I’m not sure how well I did. The sub charged with my care did give me the thumbs up at the end of the shift, but I wish I’d asked him whether I had been fast enough – I suspect I was slow, as I was being so paranoid about getting everything right. And did I get it right? That’s another thing I should have asked. I bought the paper today and I think only a couple of my headlines had been rewritten, plus one introduction where some words I had cut had been reinstated. Overall, I’m hopeful that I did pretty well.
Fingers crossed for an invitation back.
Sometimes headlines need to be changed. The existing one may be repeating a previous headline, focusing on not quite the right angle, or just plain wrong. And sometimes copy needs to be changed after it has been subbed. I fully understand this.
However, I would like to point out the following to all editorial staff who change headlines or subbed copy:
I should probably point out that at our magazine, the pages go out to the section editors on paper after they have been subbed. The section editors give them back to the subs with changes marked on page in pen. The subs put the changes in and issue a new proof, which goes to the editor or deputy editor, who marks their changes on the page and gives it back to the subs again. And sometimes, again and again and again.
So, on a regular basis, the subs find themselves trying to bash the proverbial square peg into a round hole. But, worry not! I have come up with a solution.
All editorial staff who want to change subbed copy should undertake one hour of training a day on this spatial awareness device (pictured right), until they can correctly answer the following three questions:
Are the bricks:
a) all exactly the same size
b) of varying size and shape
c) simply in need of a good telling off
When selecting a brick to put into a hole, should you:
a) rely on pure fanciful whimsy
b) close your eyes, reach out a hand and jab wildly
c) have a look at the size and shape of both the brick and the hole
Which of the following is true?
a) the square brick fits in the square hole and only the square hole
b) if the square shape won’t fit in the round hole, the sub-editor is shit
c) the shapes can be kerned to fit any hole, can’t they?
Welcome! This is my sparkly new site. Do you like it? It’s still a work in progress, so feel free to tell me what you think.
The comment form is a bit different, but don’t be fooled – the name, email address and website address parts are all optional.
I’m off to an event held by the Brighton Future of News group tonight. Web designer and developer Richard Pope will be giving a speech on web activity surrounding the upcoming election. It’s at 7.30pm at The Skiff and the link is here, should anyone be interested.
There are also other similar groups around the UK, links here.
*Note: The company reserves the right to use the Blood for whatever purpose it deems fit. This may included supplementing the workforce by growing new hybrid IT-hack-sales drones in its top-secret tank in the cellar.
On occasion, I discover that a word I had always thought existed is in fact a figment of my imagination. Does anyone else have these?
To misle – until quite recently, I believed there was such a word, because of all the times I had read “he misled her”, etc. And I gave it a slightly sneakier meaning than ‘mislead’ – more along the lines of ‘hoodwink’ (which is an excellent word!).
And a couple of other similar things I’ll own up to:
Misunderestimate – a mating of misunderstand and underestimate. I’ve never actually written this one, but when I’m speaking of misunderstandings and underestimations, it’s always lurking there waiting to spring out.
Survery – my fingers won’t let me type ‘survey’ without inserting an ‘r’. Perhaps a hangover from that long-ago dissertation on slavery? Or perhaps I have a subconscious obsession with serveries.
Anyone else care to confess?
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