Bus plunge
Bus plunge stories are a nickname for a journalistic practice of reporting bus mishaps in short articles that 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 exist 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, 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.
The adoption of computerized layout tools has reduced the need for such filler stories, but news wires continue to carry them.
PRESS BOX
The Rise and Fall of the “Bus Plunge” Story
What killed this former New York Times staple?
By JACK SHAFER
NOV 13, 2006 • 5:50 PM
As recently as 1980, the
New York Times reserved an honored—if small—place in its pages for “bus plunge” news. Whenever buses nose-dived down mountainsides; off bridges and cliffs; over embankments, escarpments, and precipices; through abutments and guardrails; or into ravines, gorges, valleys, culverts, chasms, canyons, canals, lakes, and oceans, the news wires moved accounts of the deadly tragedies, and the
Times would reliably edit them down to one paragraph and publish.
As an example of the genre, it’s hard to beat this 30-word gem I culled from the March 5, 1959, edition of the
Times:
15 Africans Die in Bus Plunge
MATTAIELE, Union of South Africa, March 5 (Reuters)—Fifteen Africans were killed and thirty others were injured today when a bus careened out of control off a cliff near the Mabusa mission station, about fifteen miles from here.
[More], the old journalism review, discovered the Times’ affinity for bus plunges in 1972, reproducing in its November issue 30 examples from the paper. But its editors confessed that they didn’t know what to make of the phenomenon: “No one on the [
Times] foreign desk is talking.”
Of course, bus plunges still claim hundreds of lives around the world each year. A
Web site records the most noteworthy accidents. On average, the news wires publish one or two plunge stories each month. But the bus-plunge story rarely stops at West 43rd Street anymore. The ProQuest newspaper database shows that the
Times published a high of 20 of the shorts in 1968 and ran them frequently throughout the 1970s. But Nexis snares only three examples of the genre in the
Times during the last five years.
Writer
Tom Miller called the genre’s demise to my attention more than a year ago and asked me to investigate. “Are there no more stringers in the Himalayas or the Andes?” Miller wrote in an e-mail, asking if buses, drivers, and highways were safer now.
Miller devotes a chapter to the accidents in his 1986 book
The Panama Hat Trail, advising travelers on how best to avoid bus-plunge victimhood. Inspect the bus for balding tires. Does the vehicle have at least one windshield wiper? That’s an excellent sign, especially if it’s on the driver’s side, Miller writes. For the good of your heart, avoid seats that give a view of oncoming traffic. If the driver’s wife or girlfriend is a passenger, board that bus: Her presence gives him an added incentive to survive the trip.
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