If you missed Jack Shafer’s “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Bus Plunge’ Story” last week, I much recommend it. Not only will you learn about this gruesomely fascinating category of journalism, but by the end you may yearn for the long lost days of the K-hed (not K-Fed; nobody will be sorry to lose him).
As an example of the genre, I have appropriated from Slate the scan of one specimen from the Sept. 1, 1956 New York Times:
As Shafer documents, the phenomenon has all but disappeared from the Times. But on the Internet it lives on — not just on the aptly named Bus Plunge! website, but also, just this afternoon, on the front page of CNN.com:
More on the accident here, but I must warn you — if you enjoy your gallows humor, I don’t recommend clicking through.
