“Knicker thief spared prison after being caught in house” is an appropriate headline for a story of lingerie larceny.
Nevertheless, I wonder if the article’s accompanying photograph is the right one.
Have Avon & Somerset Constabulary started kitting out their finest like combatants in the English Civil War?
I think we should be told.
Vampires are a mainstay of horror films. Seemingly dead, they rise again unbidden under the right circumstances – usually nightfall – to carry on their (non-)existence.
The press equivalent of the vampire is the story which is initially posted online, only to be deleted (with its expectant reader served up a 404 error page instead. Ed.) and then reappear at a later date.
This happened with the Bristol Post story featured in the screenshot below.
This story originally appeared online first thing on Friday morning, only to be pulled a couple of hours later. It has now risen from the dead bearing a Sunday timestamp.
Why was it pulled in the first place, some may be wondering, particularly as it seems like a fairly innocuous tale of an elderly gentleman moaning about parking and especially since those with an intimate knowledge of the Bristol Post will be well aware of its passion for the motor car and all matters motoring.
Indeed, still on all things motoring, the only matter upon which the Post has not offered fawning support to Bristol’s elected mayor George Ferguson is the red-trousered one’s plans to introduce Residents’ Parking Zones, which the paper and its readers have attacked with gusto. One would have thought that George was proposing a murder of first-born children not some modest proposals to counter the dominance of the motor car in our urban environment.
Whether vampire stories feed on blood or some other substance or medium is as yet unknown.
Every story needs a good, pertinent and accurate headline, as shown by this item in the news section of today’s online edition of the Bristol Post.
The headline has been corrected since the above screenshot was taken at 8.00 am.
The Guardian, immortalised in Private Eye as The Grauniad for its error-prone typographical propensities, now reveals its errors are not restricted to orthography.
The home page of today’s online edition has a link to an item on machine translation and online translation tools. The perils of machine translation is a topic which has also featured on this blog (posts passim).
However, the link to the report is illustrated by an image depicting interpreters at work, as the following screenshot shows.
This means The Guardian is now the latest media outlet in the UK willing to employ illiterates who can’t tell interpreters from translators along with the likes of the BBC (posts passim) and the Bristol Post (posts passim).
This blog has a handy illustrated guide on the difference between these two sorts of linguists should employees of any of the above organisations need enlightenment.
Not only has this blog noticed that the English employed by the Bristol Post may occasionally fall below the standards required in primary school (posts passim), but regular readers of the online edition have also noticed that the code running the website is a tad dodgy. How many comments are shown below the report featured in the screenshot?
If 1 = 2 in Bristol Post land, is it any wonder its journalists regularly manage to make 2 + 2 = 5? 😉
Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.
Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.
Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.
How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.
This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.
As any journalist knows, an appropriate picture can add interest to what would otherwise be a dull story. However, what a quay full of cars has to do with a report on school expansion in Portishead, only the Bristol Post knows.
Evidently, the above image is so good, the Post decided to use it a second time for a completely unrelated report into Frenchay Hospital.
Both screenshots were taken from the Bristol Post website at about 7.00 a.m. on Friday. However, the ‘featured image’ might have changed by the time you read the articles. 🙂
The greengrocers’ – or superfluous – apostrophe has a special place if one’s selling bananas (shouldn’t that be banana’s? Ed.), but it looks sadly out of place in Bristol’s newspaper of record, which is what happened yesterday in this heartening story from the St George area of the city.
The offending punctuation even had the temerity to turn up in the item’s opening sentence, as follows:
Crofts End Church in St George has just opened the doors to it’s newly refurbished internet suite.
No doubt the bosses at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth believe the downward spiral in quality is a small price to pay for what they’re saving by not employing sub-editors.
This blog has before drawn attention to the difficulty of devising an apposite newspaper headline (posts passim).
No such troubles beset the Bristol Post as shown by the following headlines from today’s News section of the online version.
One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?
Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂
Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:
I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.
This weekend marks the start of the competition for the FA Cup, the most prestigious trophy in English football, with the start of the preliminary round, when all the amateur teams in the local leagues around the country have their chance of a cup run for glory, i.e. it’s the round where all the Davids battle it out for a chance to challenge Goliath.
By way of an example, Market Drayton Town, the team from the town of my birth, has a home tie today against Kidsgrove Athletic, which kicks off at 3 pm.
The FA website has a list of fixtures for the preliminary round, which runs to many pages, a screenshot of which is shown below.
However, if – as many people do – you relied on the BBC as a source of sports news, you’d be completely unaware of the existence of the FA Cup preliminary round, as proven by the following screenshot taken today at the same time as the above FA screenshot.
That’s right! According to Auntie, there are no FA Cup fixtures for the next 7 days.
The BBC likes to base its reputation on its reliable and accurate coverage of news and events.
Is this reputation undeserved? Answers in the comments below please.