Yesterday’s Bristol Post featured a report of a man found dead at the scene of a camper van fire at the Hengrove Mounds nature reserve in south Bristol.
Reports about unexpected or unexplained deaths are not exactly uncommon fare for the local press anywhere.
However, what made this particular incident unusual was the manner in which the reporter chose to represent the subsequent action of the police after attending the incident, as quoted directly from the piece itself.
Efforts are currently ongoing to identify him in order to update his next of kin.
Update?
Use of appropriate language is just as important in writing for the local media as it is to a scientist writing a paper or an author penning a work of fiction. The poor man’s next of kin are not like software or kitchen cabinets!
For the benefit of any passing media studies graduates pretending to be journalists, you would have been told by any half-decent sub-editor that relatives and the next of kin are either notified or informed of their loved one’s untimely demise. Lumping grieving family in with software that needs a bug fix is not only very bad English indeed, but abysmal writing not worthy of being classed as journalism.