Good bad lunks

Wrestling with emojis, channelling Bob Katter: rethinking the humble broken link error page took James Jeffrey to some strange places.

The idea started with an elegant simplicity when The Australian newspaper’s chief executive Nicholas Gray noticed that the Financial Times had jazzed up the 404 error page on its website. Gone was the drab message: replacing it was a page on which the broken link was amusingly explained according to different schools of economic thought.

For a reader copping a broken link instead of the story they’d been led to expect, it worked as a nice, droll bit of compensation — and then some.

Gray asked if I could do something to freshen up our 404 and offer readers something that might at the very least blunt their annoyance. My work at the Oz involves sending up pollies, and I didn’t stray far. Our 404s, I said, should be explained by members of our political class — some with slightly amended real quotes, some with bogus ones, but always in character. Paul Keating was the obvious starting point: “This is the 404 we had to have.”

I would later explain to BuzzFeed’s Mark Di Stefano what happened next: “(Gray) said, ‘Do you reckon you could do it?’ and I said, ‘I sure as shit could.’ I went to the shed at the end of the garden with a bottle of red and smashed them out.”

I typed and drank away in there under the watchful gaze of my pet snakes, chuckling at a Peter Costello gag, wrestling with emojis — for the first time — for Julie Bishop’s spot, exhausting my fingers as they typed furlongs of Rob Oakeshott, and worrying about my psychological stamina as I channelled Bob Katter. Once you’ve trained your brain to think in Katterisms, there’s no guarantee you can untrain it.

Led by Stuart Fagg, the Oz’s digital team reckoned we should do the entries individually rather than on a single page a la the Financial Times. Which one you scored was basically a chook raffle, though curious readers could choose different pollies from a dropdown menu.

As the team started building it, I added more entries. The idea was I would keep tweaking them along the way or creating new ones in response to events.

We launched it, then did something uncharacteristic: We didn’t say a word. The 404s couldn’t be introduced — they had to be encountered in the wild. In the end it was the Herald Sun’s Rob Harris who discovered them (in the Captain Cook sense), and he proceeded to get excited on social media. My Twitter mentions went berserk.

The BuzzFeed story quickly followed, and it was a breakthrough. Not only was BuzzFeed keen about something The Australian had done, but News Corp Australia big cheese Campbell Reid went on to quote BuzzFeed approvingly. A new paradigm!

The ABC’s then managing director Mark Scott sent out a tweet that simultaneously complimented and sledged: “Like some of the news reporting, the 404 error pages on the Oz website show masterful creativity.”

As it exploded beautifully and unexpectedly all over social media, Pedestrian and Junkee followed BuzzFeed’s lead and wrote it up. Fagg said it was the best free marketing The Australian had had in years. And it’s taken on something of a life of its own.

Our 404s do not stand still. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing the “quote” on an existing entry when a pollie does something irresistibly 404-able. Sometimes a whole new entry needs to be cooked up. Either way, my colleagues Grant Ayre and Kellie Southan are speed demons. Even if I come up with something daft — “Hey, could we do an entry for Scott Morrison’s lump of coal?” — they wave their magic wands and it’s done.

Our response time is now so tight, the 404s constitute a fun sort of newswire service.

Some are more straightforward than others. Sam Dastyari’s — cranked out in response to his Chinese sponsorship woes — is written in Mandarin without further explanation. I figured some would find this mildly amusing in itself. It’s even better for anyone able to translate it and find it reads, “This isn’t as bad as it looks.”

Barnaby Joyce’s (“Sorry the lunk’s shut”) had some asking what a “lunk” was. I preferred to leave them wrestling with this enigma rather than explain it was “the link’s shit” in a Kiwi accent.

But most are straightforward and keep gathering fans, even among those who have yet to develop an admiration for the Oz itself. You don’t even need to be an Australian politics junkie to enjoy it. Take Torque’s Nick Shaferhoff, who wrote of the Oz’s website: “… it should be noted that it has one of the best 404 error pages I have seen in my life (which I found out by accident)”.

In the meantime we roll on, having a ball owning up to our mistakes.

James Jeffrey pens Strewth and parliamentary sketches for The Australian. His book My Family and Other Animus will be released by MUP in 2018. Twitter: @James_Jeffrey.