You may recall that a few weeks ago I gave City News the title of “Worst Newspaper In The Country” [1] and that part of my criticism related to their anonymous editorial “by some anonymous person calling themselves “The Whip”, who…provides a fairly generic semi-relevant rubbishing of the news.”
I picked up City News when it arrived today and had a flick through, and was suprised to find an editorial by somebody with a name, Catherine Lumby to be precise. I decided that it would be worthwhile having a read of this new editorial, and was sadly disappointed.
I was expecting something with some relevance to the current world situation, instead I found myself enduring her writing an essay about her view of the definition of sexual harrassment, and then found that the entire thing had just been lifted from Crikey.com.au [2].
It reminded me to some extent of those columns you tend to see near the editorial and letters to the editor in a real newspaper, except that those tend to have some relevance to the news in the paper. At least those aren’t lifted from a website.
Perhaps City News would be better off calling it a “column” rather than an “editorial” as the term “editorial” in a newspaper indicates that the column is written by one of the editors and is related to the news. A “column” on the other hand is an opinion peice that doesn’t necessarily relate to anything, but usually relates to the news.
I suppose City News could just call it “Crikey Corner”.
If you want to read Ms. Lumby’s ramblings, it is currently available on the City News website [3] and probably more permanantly on crikey.com.au [4].
Samuel