Bus plunge stories are a nickname for a journalistic practice of reporting bus accidents in short articles that describe the vehicle as "plunging" from a bridge or hillside road.[1][2][3] The phenomenon has been noted in The New York Times, which published many bus plunge stories from the 1950s through the 1980s, running about 20 such articles in 1968 alone.[4]
Commentators on the "bus plunge" phenomenon have suggested that such reports were printed not because they were considered particularly newsworthy, 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, and 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.[4][3] Columnist John McIntyre has called the reports "phatic journalism" that pretends to inform the reader about world events without any significant news gathering.[5] The development of computerized layout tools in the 1970s eventually reduced the need for such filler stories, but newswires continue to carry them.[4][3]
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