Bus plunge
Encyclopedia
Bus plunge stories are a nickname for a journalistic
practice of reporting bus
mishaps in short articles that invariably describe the vehicle as "plunging" from a bridge or hillside road. The phenomenon has been noted in the New York Times, which once published as many as 14 "bus plunge" stories per year in its foreign news section.
The stories made the news not only because of their perceived newsworthiness but because they could be reduced to a few lines and used to fill gaps in the page layout. Further, the words "bus" and "plunge" are short, so can be used in one-column headlines within the narrow, eight-column format that was prevalent in newspapers through the first half of the 20th century.
The adoption of computerized layout tools has reduced the need for such filler stories, but news wires continue to carry them.
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
practice of reporting bus
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
mishaps in short articles that invariably describe the vehicle as "plunging" from a bridge or hillside road. The phenomenon has been noted in the New York Times, which once published as many as 14 "bus plunge" stories per year in its foreign news section.
The stories made the news not only because of their perceived newsworthiness but because they could be reduced to a few lines and used to fill gaps in the page layout. Further, the words "bus" and "plunge" are short, so can be used in one-column headlines within the narrow, eight-column format that was prevalent in newspapers through the first half of the 20th century.
The adoption of computerized layout tools has reduced the need for such filler stories, but news wires continue to carry them.