A letter from a PS News reader arrived recently raising a deep and meaningful matter that in all of its 18 years, PS News had never thought of the reason to deal with.
Geraint D of the National Health and Medical Research Council wanted to know: “Why do you refuse to use paragraphs in your stories?”
We thought we did, but Geraint pointed out “Your sentence as paragraph approach is actually harder to read than conventional paragraphs”.
Interested to say the least, the PS News editor responded with “Thanks for your comment. I didn’t know PS News wasn’t using paragraphs.”
Then intrigued by the possibility that we might have been doing it wrong for donkeys years, the now worried editor went newspaper nutty, checking what others were doing and discovering something even Geraint wasn’t aware of.
What he found out was that PS News did exactly the same as all the good papers around town.
“Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age, Brisbane Courier Mail and Adelaide Advertiser all deliver most of their big news stories one line at a time,” PS News defended itself with.
“And so does PS News”.
To his credit, Geraint checked for himself and wrote back. “I think you are right, even the Guardian does it,” he rattled.
“I had assumed it was some coding issue rather than journalistic style but maybe I’m wrong.”
PS News is nothing if not a good winner so Geraint can expect to receive a Perfectly Popular Pack of PS-sssst! Paraphernalia as our way of saying thankyou.
In the meantime, we’ll probably start adding a few paragraphs to our pages, just so we aren’t confused by other newspapers.
Standing stunned
Wonderful news for the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) last month hosting its biggest audience yet turning up to a conference last month.
According to ANZSOG its “First Peoples to All Peoples: partnerships, devolution, transformation and sharing conference, held in Brisbane from 1-3 March, was ANZSOG’s largest yet attracting over 800 in-person attendees and over 300 others watching online”.
A terrific result, and one PS News and its readers were privileged to play a part in by circulating details of the conference last November.
As it turned out no fewer than 703 PS News readers enquired about the conference and might just have played a part in helping ANZSOG achieve its record.
We’d like to think we did!
The lesson, of course is if you or your Department, Agency, Office, Division, Unit, Bureau or other PS group have an event on the way, make sure PS News knows about it so we can tell everyone.
Inequality of equality?
To the creativity of creating a confused clip now where an innocent ‘citation’ is abbreviated to make way for a prize-winning gender equality employer honoured for closing the gender equality gap among the fastest.
“Publishing employer gender pay gaps will provide deeper insights on their employer’s progress,” the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) explained.
“From 2024, employees will have access to the key indicator of how their organisation is performing on gender equality”, it promised.
A worthwhile encouragement in anyone’s view, with WGEA also announcing its ‘Employer of Choice for Gender Equality’ citations were already getting results.
But the citations caught PS-sssst!’s eye when their abbreviation ‘EOCGE’ was revealed.
The six-word title ‘Employer of Choice for Gender Equality’ exposes a 5-letter abbreviation, so who or what was it that missed the sixth?
PS-sssst! notes it was ‘for’ that failed and was forgotten while ‘of’ managed to be affirmed.
Yet ‘for’ has more letters than ‘of’, and even has its own ‘of’ but backwards!
Heaven forbid but could the letter ‘F’ have a case for ‘Equality’?
Only time will tell!
Cinematic Seize
To Rama Gaind’s convivial competition now where it’s time for three lucky readers to become three new owners of Rama’s action thriller DVD movie The Siege with Norwegian hulk Daniel Stisen.
To win our own ‘Siege’, all we had to do was tell Rama who it was who delivered what he set out to do in The Siege and then be one of the first three entries to be plucked from the judge’s infamous PS News Barrel of Booty.
The correct answer was The Seige’s director, Brad Watson who set out to “bring a sense of fun back to the action genre, keep the threat real, the emotions true but the brutality of the action balanced by a wry tone that doesn’t take itself too seriously”.
And the three lucky winners who emerged triumphantly were Scott M from the Federal Department of Health and Aged Care, Voret C from the Australian Taxation Office and Rod M from Queensland Health.
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part in Rama’s race to riches. The winners’ winnings will be winging their way to their new whereabouts swiftly.
For another week of given away giveaways all we have to do is play Rama’s giveaway game by sending your answer to one or both of her reviews of the DVD Johnny & Clyde at this PS News link and/or her other live running review DVD The Amazing Maurice at this link.
Good luck to all and everyone who joins in the fun.
Records reached again
Another month and another public sector record breaking as the readerships of PS News hit new heights and pass the 189,000 mark for the first time last month.
Among the public services who broke their own records in March were the Australian Public Service who made it to 69,900 readers for the first time; NSW PS who hit 22,900; Victoria PS 22,300; Queensland 15,800 and South Australia 12,400.
Congratulations to all the public services whose readerships keep growing and a big thankyou to everyone continuing to add their friends, workmates, staff members and others to PS News so we can bring the latest of PS information and interest to as many readers as possible.
A hearty thanks to all of you from all of us at PS News.
‘Till next week…..
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