Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
When I was a kid I had holiday work at SMH...
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My brother had a late-night job at The Courier Mail in the 1970s - before computerised type-setting. His task was to fill the gaps in the paper where the actual copy submitted by a journalist fell short of the space allocated. (The Editor would send a Journalist out to file a report, and allocate say 6 column-inches, but the submitted story might only run to 5 column-inches, which would leave 1 column-inch to be filled.)
They had a big filing cabinet of interesting / humorous stories, filed by their general category, and length in column-inches. He would pull out the first story with the required length, and it would be type-set accordingly. After use, it went into the back of the same rack.
Remember how papers used to run the same unattributed apocryphal stories over and over (eg the circus elephant that mistook a red Mini for its posing stand and trampled it)? Now you know why!