Today, I found this article, entitled “12 dead in S.Korea bus plunge,” on the web. As you can see from the headline, it is the story of 12 people who have been killed in a ‘bus plunge’ in South Korea. It is a sad story, but it may herald the return of the ‘bus plunge’ to the forefront of American journalism. And that, in the opinion of many, just might be a good thing.
Growing Up in a World of Plunging Busses
When I grew up (in the 60s and 70s) ‘bus plunge’ stories seemed to be everywhere. They appeared on my radar after National Lampoon published a variety of ‘bus plunge’ stories on its back pages. I looked for it on the web this morning, but I all I could find was a book on Amazon entitled National Lampoon’s Big Book of True Facts
Someone Asks ‘Why?’
Fortunately, the phenomenon of ‘bus plunge’ stories has actually been written about by a serious journalist. The serious journalist begins his story as follows:
As recently as 1980, the New York Times reserved an honored—if small—place in its pages for “bus plunge” news. Whenever buses nose-dived down mountainsides; off bridges and cliffs; over embankments, escarpments, and precipices; through abutments and guardrails; or into ravines, gorges, valleys, culverts, chasms, canyons, canals, lakes, and oceans, the news wires moved accounts of the deadly tragedies, and the Times would reliably edit them down to one paragraph and publish.
But the serious journalist notes the falling off of ‘bus plunge’ stories.
The ProQuest newspaper database shows that the Times published a high of 20 of the shorts in 1968 and ran them frequently throughout the 1970s. But Nexis snares only three examples of the genre in the Times during the last five years.
What happened to the once honored tradition of the ‘bus plunge’ story? he asks. He, being a serious journalist, uses his serious journalistic training to look for answers. And, as a serious journalist, he finds them.
It turns out that the ‘bus plunge’ rose and fell for reasons that will be obvious to journalistic insiders. But for the rest of us, it isn’t obvious at all that the phenomenon of the ‘bus plunge’ had less to do with serious journalists wanting to cover ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ and more to do with a sense of ‘journalistic parody.’
Of course, it’s callous to make light of anybody’s tragic death. But by the gallows-humor standards of journalism, competing to publish bus-plunge shorts was fairly benign.
“It was more self-parody than anything else,” Siegal says. “It was a very low-key, harmless parody of the stilted language characteristic of tightly formatted headlines.”
The Rise of the ‘Bus Plunge’
According to the serious journalist,
newspapers of the era had a physical need for short articles. Typesetting was still a time-consuming industrial art, with craftsmen pouring molten metal into molds—”hot type”—to form a newspaper’s words, sentences, and paragraphs. Because the length of a news story couldn’t be calculated precisely until type was set, makeup editors would have to physically cut overlong pieces from the bottom to make them fit. If a story ran short, they would plug the hole with brief filler stories typeset earlier in the day.
‘Bus plunge’ stories filled that need. The serious journalist continues:
The Times plunge story, for example, filled the loose space at the end of a news column on July 21, 1964:
Bus Plunge Kills 8
LAS PALMAS, Canary Islands, July 20 (UPI)—Eight persons perished today when a small bus plunged over a 300-foot cliff into the sea near the town of Mogan. One man jumped from the vehicle before it reached the edge and was saved. All the victims were Spaniards.As typeset, this article takes up 10 lines. I assume that the copy editor who cut this piece from the AP wire included the sentences about the jumper and the victims’ nationality to maximize the makeup editors’ options. By physically snipping one sentence, the makeup editors could reduce it to a nine-line story on the fly. By snipping two, they could cork an even smaller layout hole with a six-line story.
The ‘Bus Plunge’ In Its Heyday
In its heyday, the ‘bus plunge’ story had to have several aspects to be considered ‘pure.’
The chapter [in The Panama Hat Trail
] check-lists the elements of a definitive bus-plunge story: Plunge should appear in the hed; the piece should be only a couple of sentences long; and it should “include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board”—a soccer team, church choir, or students—”as well as the distance of the plunge from the capital city.” The words ravine or gorge should appear.
] check-lists the elements of a definitive bus-plunge story: Plunge should appear in the hed; the piece should be only a couple of sentences long; and it should “include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board”—a soccer team, church choir, or students—”as well as the distance of the plunge from the capital city.” The words ravine or gorge should appear.The serious journalist also notes the role that racial politics played in transforming a serious story about people plunging to their death in a remote location into a ‘journalistic parody.’
Race and culture played a big role in bus-plunge story’s placement, too. Miller quotes foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum’s equation: “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.” By and large, if an American plunged on a bus, the news was always more likely to run as a free-standing story in a U.S. newspaper than as filler.
The serious journalist is a good student of journalism, so he interviewed Allan M. Siegal. Who is Allan M. Siegal, you might be asking. He tells us:
Allan M. Siegal,…recently retired from the Times as an assistant managing editor, worked on the foreign desk during the 1960s—the bus-plunge heyday.
And the serious journalist gets some nuggets of journalistic excellence from Mr. Siegel, including this gem:
Not all bus plunges were judged equal by the foreign desk, according to Siegal. “It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names,” he says. “A bus plunge in Peru was infinitely easier to deal with than a bus plunge in Argentina or Paraguay.”
The Fall of the ‘Bus Plunge’
The serious journalist blames the conversion from ‘hot type’ to ‘cold type’ for the falling off of the ‘bus plunge.’
The opportunity for self-parody diminished as the paper transitioned from hot type to “cold type” output on photographic film. The makeup editor, who once called down the design skills of a stonemason to lay out a page, became more of a bricklayer in the 1970s, when the digital tools for fitting copy became more sophisticated. The Times completed its switch from hot to cold type on the weekend of July 4, 1978, says Siegal. Newspapers came to rely even less on shorts when full-page layout software arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s and editors requisitioned every available column inch for their big pieces.
But not all the editors were in on the joke. Apparently, some of them thought that the ‘bus plunge’ stories contributed to serious covereage of world events:
Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld, who ran the paper from 1994 to 2001, bemoaned the disappearance of shorts sometime in the middle of his tenure, says Siegal.
“He felt that our ability to fit pages precisely cost us shorts, and that shorts were in some measure the vehicle for continuity in news coverage,” Siegal says.
Lelyveld’s comical reaction to the disappearance of ‘bus plunge’ stories from the New York Times bespeaks the tragedy of not being a journalistic insider.
The Role of the ‘Bus Plunge’ in Journalism Today
The young men and women of today are struggling to keep up with their journalistic ancestors; but, unfortunately, the element of journalistic parody has disappeared almost entirely with the exigencies of ‘hot type’ journalism. All that’s left of ‘journalistic parody’ in today’s ‘cold type’ world is the words ‘Bus Plunge’ in the headline. With the longer format provided by the virtually free space provided by the computer screen, editors no longer feel a need to compress the news to fit onto a page. In today’s ‘bus plunge’ article the necessary words ‘gorge’ and ‘ravine’ do not appear, nor does the distance from the capital city. It has swelled to six paragraphs, a whopping TEN sentences, and SEVENTEEN whole lines! They even give the ages of the survivors!
It’s almost like news when you read it like that.