1/24/2008

When Heath Ledger died,

This guy is the editor of The Guardian, Murray Armstrong, and this is how he describes what he did when Heath Ledger died. How he changed the newspaper's cover. It's interesting:

Before the daily discussion at morning conference, another important events takes place --an autopsy of last night's work. The news section of the paper saw various changes throughout the evening. Early editions had a picture of Oscar-nominated Julie Christie on the front page, with a lead story on the Oscars occupying all of page 5. By late evening Reuters was reporting the death of Heath Ledger, who was found in his New York apartment yesterday. This item appeared in the later TV news bulletins and a photograph of the young actor replaced Julie Christie on the front page for late editions of the paper. A full report was carried inside on page 4, knocking the previous lead story there -- the £3m underspend of universities on poorer students -- on to page 5. That meant moving the previous page 5 lead on the Oscars to a smaller slot over on page 4. The page 3 story on President Putin and his new press officer was cut back for the fourth edition to make room for a later news story from New York on Apple's fears that the market for iPods may be reaching market saturation. Each page in the paper has a number of stars at the top and this tells you the last time that a change was made. The number of stars on the bottom left of the front page tell you which edition you are reading. So page 8 of the final, fifth edition of the paper, for instance, also has five stars above a story headlined Police suspect internet link to suicides. This replaced the previous page lead on the Newquay hotel fire. The science page on 12 also shows a late change for fifth edition but the stories remain the same. The page has been changed at this point either to repair a misspelling or to correct a small error or to insert new, more recent information. AL Kennedy's Costa book prize on page 14 has also been changed, this time at the fourth edition. The story and the book extract remain the same but the picture on the page has been changed for a contemporaneous one showing the author receiving the award. Over on page 15 the lead story was changed at the same time from a health-related town planning item to the news of the murder of 14-year-old Jessica Knight in Chorley.

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