The stages of an emerging story

3 June 2013

Re a Mark Day piece on covering an emerging disaster:

In your ‘stages of releasing a story’, you list:

* The first details

* The lists of dead/missing

* Damning those who were to blame...

But you neglected to mention The Finding of a Hero.

You chaps always find us a hero. (The one who survived through sheer grit, or saved his mate, or whatever.)

Months or years later, a la Private Lynch, the hero is usually revealed to have been a fiction.

Which fits the Australian’s mould rather nicely - I'm surprised you missed it.