WHERE, oh where, have the journalistic standrds gone?

Every day I pick up The Courier-Mail and shake my sorry head at just how many basic mistakes are made in copy - mistakes that have survived the reporter's tidying up, the sub-editor's sub-editing, the check sub's check subbing and the page proof sub's page proof subbing. Four people in the production line at one of the nation's big city dailies who either don't know the basics or don't care.

Page after page of that august journal discards frequently at least three of the five basic principles of good journalism. I'm talking about the basic five tenets if you want to make it big in the game: the big five that were obeyed religiously if you ever wanted to move on after doing the compulsory three years on tide times and four on the fruit and vegie markets (four and seven respectively if you were a bit slow on the uptake like I was) to be given a chance on police rounds or general.

I'm going to run through the Big Five as they were instilled into me because it's obvious that unless we go back to basics, the days of respect for the print media are well and truly numbered.

Let's start at number five and work our way up to the really big ones.

Basic rule No 5: Accidents happen; they don't occur. As you can see from the sloppy cut-out above from a recent Courier, at least four people just happened not to know that. Now it's even just happened to me that I don't know why it occurs that way either but that's the way it is. Or at least that's what my little blue styleguide book at The Courier-Mail said before I was asked to leave, not that I'm at all bitter about that!

Basic rule No 4: Someone dies when their car and a truck collide, not when their car collides with a truck. I have no recollection of whom it was who later died of cirrhosis of the liver who first instilled that basic piece of writing wisdom, but it makes sense. Moving objects collide with each other; it's not the reporter's role to apportion blame. This basic tenet of newspaper writing is abused so many times in The Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail that I was frankly astonished that I couldn't find an example to include in the clippings above from the couple of papers I had at my disposal for this article.

Basic rule No 3: Those morbid people in white labcoats at the State pathology lab conduct post mortem examinations, not post mortems. We're not going to learn anything about how little Johnnie died if we conduct a post death on him, are we? Already I can hear some Courier scribes murmuring that post mortem has become the accepted norm. Says who? By the way, I've been getting a few headaches and my middle vision is getting a bit blurry, so I'd better go and have an eye.

Those basic rules 3 to 5 were sacrosanct in my day. If you didn't ply them religiously, you had buckley's chance of doing something special like writing features or, heaven forbid, having your own column some day.

And now to the Big Two, if indeed, any of the top five are more important than the others.

Basic rule No 2: Don't all come back pissed from the pub at the same time because the pissed chief sub or pissed chief of staff will know then for sure that you've all be out for an extended liquid lunch together. Always stagger in at five minute intervals.

Basic rule No 1: Once you've staggered back to work, if you find you're too pissed to hit the right keys to complete the Page 3 lead the subs are sweating on, leave the building immediately and phone in your story to one of the copy takers.

If I do say so myself, blind adherence to those five basic tenets have made me what I am today: virtually unemployable.

Oh, and sorry about that spelling mistake in the intro; I was a sub-editor at The Courier-Mail for far too long.

By the way, did you know that we in the trade call spellng mistakes "littorals". "Literals" if your speling isn't all at sea like mine is.

Postscript: For any of my former Courier colleagues who might want to make me look even more stupid than normal, I have ironically left an undisclosed number of errors in this column for you to find, including several on when to use "who" and "whom" and some really sloppy use of commas. Once you've tallied up the number of punctuation and speeling mistakes, give me a call with the exact number and I'll let you know whether you're right!

*ribbon for second in the high jump, Oxley house, Aspley State School, 1962