Opinion: Another reason to avoid the bus
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Having lulled countless bus riders into a trance with this piece on L.A. mass transit’s TV party, I must lay a wreath at the smoldering remains of Jack Shafer’s magisterial study of the bus-plunge story. What is the bus-plunge story? It’s a now-forgotten genre of filler news item detailing mass-fatality bus accidents in what they used to call the Third World. Shafer explains:
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.
Fitting the utilitarian nature of that description, the bus-plunge story was the Johnny Bravo of news: popular because it fit the small spaces at the end of cut-and-paste stories. Here’s a Shafer close reading of a bus-plunge story:
Bus Plunge Kills 8LAS 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.
Shafer is not the discoverer of the bus-plunge story. Fans have been following the phenomenon for many years, and even the original bus-plunge editors had some ironic distance on the genre: They were aware of bus-plunge as a distinct genre even while they were creating it. Wikipedia’s bus-plunge entry has been up for more than a year, and there’s a bus-plunge news site. Shafer has followed up the immensely popular story. Plunge into it.