Posts by Russell Brown
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Embedding not allowed for this but...
Damn, you're right. They've blocked it. Just click on the "from YouTube" text, folks ...
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Sun Ra, out there on the perimeter ...
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crap!
posting fail.I fixed it 4 u. Just the URL ...
Leo says: "Fail is a noun!"
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The Velvet Underground
Better than Breaking Benjamin!
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Anna Coddington talks to Damian Christie about getting serious, her debut solo album, The Lake, and how she really doesn't care if people think she's pretty.
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If someone needed one of my kidneys to survive I might donate it. I might not. Would it not be my right to decide what happens with my body?
Irony alert!
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Peter Ashby - I almost never use webspeak/geektalk/whatever but your last post was ROTFLMFO...or (weakly) something like that..
I think ROFLLMAO is the one you're looking for.
My son uses ROFL rather than ROTFL, and indeed Wikipedia advises that:
The term has almost been completely replaced by ROFL, which is used much more often. ROTFL is still accepted, however, but used where Internet slang is not used as often.
I suspect ROFL has won out because, like LOL, you can say ROFL. Again, I defer to my son, who pronounces it to rhyme with "waffle", with a slight Scooby Doo inflection.
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They were a very... unreconstructed lot. The Chief Sub of the day, Brett Webling, who looked a bit like Chris Knox's bigger, scarier brother, would be hunched over his keyboard, hammering away at it, then would pause, glare around the newsroom, and bellow, "Which of you useless cunts wrote this?"
Excellent. That made me laugh out loud.
But I've seen the copy the reporters handed in, and I've seen what came out, and I'd support the notion the late shift subs floated over beer, wine, and cigarettes (smoking law? What's that?), which is they deserved most of the credit for any Quantas awards the paper won for reporting.
Or editorial or column writing. They wouldn't be the first subs to mutter darkly about that ...
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Then again the sheer rate of foreign ownership and how they've outsourced important roles like subediting is pretty interesting, in a horrible way. Is there any truth to the rumour that the NZ Herald has "outsourced" some of its subeditoring duties to India? Even if it's not, I wouldn't put it past them...
APN made a decision to centralise most sub-editing for the Herald and for its other newspapers and publications with a company called Pagemasters, operating in Auckland and Australia. In most cases that meant redundancies (the Woman's Weekly, where the editor put her foot down, was a notable exception). The idea was that it would be brilliant and efficient. The idea was stupid.
Sub-editors are often a print publication's institutional memory. They know how to spell the unusual names, and the particular quirks of individual writers. Great subs are the soul of the publication. Outsourcing that duty to a sausage factory loses you so much.
Ironically, it hasn't been more efficient at all. It's been the reverse. The faceless (and probably junior, and overworked) subs at Pagemasters actually introduce mistakes to copy, which always has to be checked on return. They generally can't write headlines, standfirsts or captions either. It's basically a mess.
And it's a relief to now be able to say so.
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Sad to see RB go from it - horrified at -26% pay from start of tenure till end. You'd think with good growth figures, the pay rates would follow suit??
Well, to be clear I did demand and get a $50 pw increase in about March. But that still left me $50 short of what I was earning before the present editor arrived. Long story, glad I don't have to bother with it any more.
But the deeper story, as I said, is what's happened to freelance pay rates in general in the last 15 years, while largely foreign print media owners have pocketed the returns. It's bad.
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