Stupid. Always.

Pick up the poor, sad Age on any day of the week and the tactile, old-fashioned experience of flicking pages while doing what one can to avoid ink rubbing off on the hands remains one of the few things that have not changed since the days when Melbourne’s shrunken broadsheet was a decent newspaper, edited by adults and careful most of the time to get the facts right. Today, of course, former readers know that it is, at least for the moment, a still-daily exercise in sylvan sadism: all those poor trees reduced to pulp so the newsroom’s gaggle of social-justice warriors, general incompetents, recent womyns studies grads, Islamist apologists, click-bait promoters, editors who won’t edit and Mark Kenny can demonstrate that rock bottom is not the worst of it if you are determined to keep on digging.

That’s the editorial content, which is perhaps no less than might be expected. Fill your newsrooms with journalism-school graduates and what else might you expect?

For those who work on the commercial side of a newspaper, things should be far more simple. Their object is to book ads, sell copies and turn a profit, which is a straightforward brief and, or so one would think, rather difficult to mess up. Ah, but this is The Age we are talking about, where it seems the the editorial floor’s incapacity to get anything right has spread like a contagious dementia to the advertising department.

Atop this post is an ad commiserating with the Western Bulldogs for losing the AFL Grand Final. Click on the image to enlarge it and read the tear-stained copy. One guesses two  layouts were prepared, pending the home-town team’s defeat or victory, and a very big dill chose to publish the wrong one.

The Bulldogs took the flag, their first in 62 years, on Saturday afternoon. Apparently, just like their Fairfax editorial counterparts, the ad staff can’t get anything right.

Or perhaps the ad department works according to the same rules that see blonde economics writer Jessica Irvine just make stuff up, in this instance asserting that Pauline Hanson wishes to stop all immigration. She doesn’t of, of course, just the wrong kind of immigrants. Andrew Bolt has more via the link below.

— roger franklin

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