The recent kerfuffle at the Sunday Star-Times following the last-minute decision by the newspaper’s parent company, Fairfax Media, to physically yank a number of offensive pages out of each and every printed copy of the title’s glossy supplement has received a spot of unexpected international coverage. (Thanks be to Mr Russell Brown for the heads-up.)

Last month, Fairfax hired casual staff in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, at $30 an hour over a period of two days, to rip four pages out of all copies of an edition of the Sunday supplement devoted to sexual themes.

As we reported at the time in the NBR, the company had been uneasy, in particular, with a comment piece by the lift-out's editor, Emily Simpson, who recently returned to the editorial fold after a year on parental leave and had only just received an unusually impassioned rev-up from editor Cate Brett about the pressing need to produce jazzy pieces capable of making an impact in these trying commercial times, etc.

Upon catching wind of the item, Fairfax executives Joan Withers and Paul Thompson ordered that the already-printed copies of Sunday — all 200,000 of them — be denuded of the scandalous inclusion.

Unfortunately for the Sunday paper, there’s no such thing as a media secret on the web these days — as the brief piece in the US-based Editors Weblog, attributed to Australia’s Peter Ong, a regional director for the Society for News Design and a newspaper consultant, demonstrates.

Along with the predictable handwringing over Fairfax’s “highhanded” treatment, the site has uploaded a copy of the offending editorial comment, which, we have to say, after all the advance billing it received is a bit of a letdown.

The Story of O it ain’t, but the story Ms Simpson, we assume from the fuss her offerings on this occasion continues to draw, awaits a concluding chapter.