This morning I was leafing through an old guide to subbing from 1968. There were a couple of pages in it stressing the importance of ensuring articles do not clash with adjacent adverts. Weight loss advert next to an anorexia story, cigarette advert next to a lung cancer report, that kind of thing.

Well, it seems that, 40 years on, not everyone is paying attention to their text books. Or their website. Not satisfied with putting images of a plane emerging from a ball of fire adjacent to a story about today’s terrorist bomb attack in Moscow, the Sun’s website made use of some nifty graphics to have plane and fireball emerge from the story itself, leaving behind a charred hole.

Although my book has an additional chapter on new forms of ‘electronic sub-editing’, it doesn’t cover this kind of thing in any detail. I checked. It is however called ‘The Simple Subs Book’, so it may, after all this time, still be ideally suited to some.

h/t currybetdotnet