Blowing a major headline..

WordDemon · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 9:38 am

Anybody here put themselves in this precarious situation?I go to school at East Carolina University, a university with a large dimwitted population and one hell of a bad football team.Our paper is so-so. Anyway, our chancellor recently resigned, and that doesn't happen everyday. My boss the editor-in-chief scooped everyone on the story, including the AP and the Charlotte Observer. The chancellor declined interviews with everyone but us. That too doesn't happen often.[b]Muse steps down, sites health reasons[b]The boss wrote that headline, I had been at class and work all day and missed it. I think this would have gotten me pink-slipped in the real world, no?

Gatekeeper · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 2:10 pm

It depends on where you're employed.In my mere 5.5 years as a copy editor, incorrect words have made it into my major headlines twice. Each time I missed it, it was missed by the copy editor/proofer who checked the page and, finally, was missed by a third person on press run. Each time I punished myself more than my superiors did.Copy editors aren't infallible. Other mistakes that my fellow co-workers have made included:1. Running copy over ads.
2. Forgetting to put a jump on.
3. Sending readers to the wrong jump page.
4. Judgment calls that the editor didn't agree with (the next day, of course).No one has ever been fired at my place for those errors, although one copy editor was relegated to never doing 1A again (but was allowed to do any other page). I suspect it's because we're into self-punishment here, and because it's hard to find good, experienced copy editors. We can't just willy-nilly get rid of folks who make a few mistakes, even if they can be humiliating. What we do do is make sure the mistakes aren't repeated and, for the most part, they aren't (or years will pass before it happens again).Gatekeeper-30-

Phillip Blanchard · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 2:22 pm

I misspelled "Grenada" on one page three times in 1983. I survived but my sense of infallibility was lost for a decade.

paulwiggins · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 6:26 pm

I once headlined a story in 60 point It's curioser and curioser, said Alice.
This got through because I was both the op-ed copy subeditor and the sole stone sub (the person, in this instance, working with the typesetters, compositors, litho people, press hands, bindery staff and trucks.
The boss gave me a telling off that left me in tears, then rang back later to assure me that I was a fine fellow.
I'd never approach it in the same way but I treasure both the bollicking and the reassurance.

dmfugitive · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 6:44 pm

an old hand at my previous paper loved bringing out a years-old first edition with the 96pt. banger "EGYPT'S SADAT ASSINATED."hey, it happens.

jmcg · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 7:35 pm

<blockquote>quote:<hr>Originally posted by blanp:
I misspelled "Grenada" on one page three times in 1983. I survived but my sense of infallibility was lost for a decade.<hr></blockquote>Three times? So repetitive. Couldn't you have subbed one -- to, say, "Marxist-Leninist outpost"? Or another to "haven for 'C' students who still want to go to med school"?You must have been the foreign editor that night.
I surely hope that, in the spirit and tenor of the times, you dummied a story out of El Salvador to run across six columns. Then you could have said "Massachusetts-sized nation" in a hed.[ November 11, 2003: Message edited by: jmcg ]

pzicari · **Posted:** Tue Nov 11, 2003 11:36 pm

>> The boss gave me a telling off that left me in tears, The last guy that did that to me taught me two things: That it's not about me -- everyone makes mistakes, and I'm making a career of fixing as many as I can -- and that life is too short to endure abuse. I got out. Even at my advancing age, I would leave an abusive boss as soon as I could.

Jackie · **Posted:** Wed Nov 12, 2003 12:19 am

I killed someone off in a headline earlier this year. (It was only a flesh wound...) He had been shot by his wife or ex or someone like that, and I don't know what happened, I guess I got it in my head he'd been shot and killed. It didn't get in the paper but it did on the Web, and unfortunately, he was a local someone. And apparently when he called my boss he was pretty nice about it. Sigh.....

ShiningPath · **Posted:** Wed Nov 12, 2003 2:48 am

I find that it's usually the most productive, strap-the-newspaper-on-their-back copy editors who make these shockingly embarrassing mistakes. That's because they're accepting the most opportunities to make mistakes day after day. It's the same way in baseball: the guy who makes the most errors isn't the worst fielder; he's the guy who gets to the most batted balls. The worst fielder is the guy who doesn't make a lot of errors but stands in the same place all the time and doesn't go after the hard hits. We've all worked with copy editors like that. The only way to avoid making mistakes is to do absolutely nothing.

Rio · **Posted:** Wed Nov 12, 2003 11:33 am

I agree with your analogy, but only up to a point.Of course, you're right when you say that good copy editors can't be judged solely on the basis of how many mistakes get through them. The best copy editors make an aggressive effort to improve copy, and while that means they're going to make a lot of great saves, a few errors are going to slip through -- errors that lesser copy editors wouldn't have made.But then there are copy editors who make a lot of mistakes because, well, they're bad copy editors.If I may use your baseball analogy in an example that should hit close to home, Jose Valentin didn't make 20 errors this past season because he's such a great fielder. He's just a lousy shortstop.[ November 12, 2003: Message edited by: Gary Kirchherr ]

pjaymac · **Joined:** Tue Apr 09, 2002 12:01 am **Posts:** 9

Couldn't resist the chance to jump in on a baseball-related thread.Regarding the main point of the discussion: It's unfortunate that our jobs are the kind where one gets noticed more for what one misses than for what one catches. But that's the way it goes.Regarding the Jose Valentin reference: True, Valentin is a lousy shortstop. But Derek Jeter consistently makes anywhere from 14 to 25 errors a season, yet he is among the three or four shortstops in both leagues whom any baseball fan would want on his or her World Series team.So I don't think you can judge a copy editor by the number of mistakes he or she makes. Other factors (whatever they are) have to enter into the equation.

KELjustKEL · **Posted:** Wed Nov 12, 2003 10:35 pm

My newspaper's features desk/graphics department once put out a tab section with a group of celebrity pictures and the headline "What do these people have in commom?" The answer was dyslexia.
The entire run was destroyed and printed again. (except for the few we saved...)
Believe it or not, there was someone who said, "Maybe people will think we did it on purpose," as they advocated not reprinting the section.

JonScribe · **Posted:** Thu Nov 13, 2003 6:55 pm

To Sri with love.As long as we're posting horrid examples...I once transposed the r and i in Sri Lanka in an 1A hed (below the fold, thankfully).

onelaneroad · **Posted:** Fri Nov 14, 2003 10:26 pm

The worst thing that appeared in our paper, at least that I can remember, happened on my one night off. How no one caught this, I don't know ... all I can think is that it's such a basic thing that everyone "read" it correctly when it wasn't. One of our reporters wrote that Africa was a country instead of a continent. I cannot tell you the utter fear and dread I felt when I picked up the paper the next day and read that, and then came in to work only to be greeted by a VERY unhappy EIC and a TON of e-mails.
I kept wondering how the HELL I had missed that. I didn't even remember reading it. And then I realized the reason I didn't remember reading it was because I hadn't; I was off that night.
I still wince when I think about it. No excuse for that one.

Bumfketeer · **Posted:** Fri Nov 14, 2003 11:21 pm

As a longtime hockey player, now retired, this is how I like to say it:If an NHL goalie stops 95 percent of the shots, he's in the hall of fame.If a copy editor stops 95 percent of the bad shit that comes in, they're a useless fuckup.

kopyeditor · **Posted:** Tue Feb 24, 2004 9:27 pm

Hi folks, I'm the new kid on the block. I'm not really a copy editor any more--just a stringer and job hunter--but I have done it. I had to jump into the thread on heinous errors. When I was doing a DJNF internship at the Tennessean, I once convicted an alleged armed robber by forgetting the word "alleged." No excuse for that. It went out in the first edition, which went out to the sticks, but the slot caught it before it got into the city editions.The next example is not a hed, but was still embarrassing. I had a story about road construction, in which the reporter said drivers were often frustrated to sit idling "while crews jackhammer rock and roll pavement." At the time, I was tired, I was ready to go home, and I must not have been thinking too hard. I turned "rock and roll" into "rock 'n' roll." Being a Yankee, I thought, "Hmm, I guess "rock 'n' roll pavement" is a popular expression down here in Tennessee." Oops. Reporter Jennifer Goode was understandably miffed. Sorry, Jennifer Goode. I done bad.

Matthew Grieco · **Posted:** Tue Feb 24, 2004 10:16 pm

The worst thing I can recall from my time was when we ran the mug shot of a man accused of a local triple-murder with the name of the husband and father of the three victims (who was also mentioned in the story) printed underneath the mug instead of the name of the accused.The horror of this error was compounded by the fact that the husband and father had been the original suspect in the case and had since been cleared. I don't know what happened to the copy editor who made the error, but it wasn't enough.This mistake led to the implementation of a new photo storage policy that required a lot of extra work for copy editors and addressed just about everything except for the problem that actually caused the error.

Matthew Grieco · **Posted:** Tue Feb 24, 2004 10:24 pm

And in fairness, I should disclose my own worst error, since everyone else is. I once ran the same story twice on the same page of the same edition(A3), once under the correct headline and once under an unrelated headline. I was making corrections off of proofs and negligently flowed the same story into both holes on the page. I was both wire editor and slot that night, so I repeated my error when I neglected to notice it on the negative.On the other hand, I found out the next day that people really were interested in whatever the hell the story I left out was about, because hundreds of readers had read the headline and called up to ask what the story said.

catrandom · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 3:15 am

I'm sorry, but I'm laughing my head off here as I wrap up today's 15-plus-hour shift. I've got 10 years-plus at this, and I've not only missed reporters' mistakes, I've helpfully added mistakes when the reporters didn't provide them. My worst: I too have killed on the job, having made the decision to run with an obit that was, as it turned out, about 48 hours premature. I've signed off on a page with a typo in a giant headline and stories that jumped nowhere, or jumped twice. So we did a few rounds of "How can we make sure nothing like this ever happens again!?" (Answer: Beats me.)[ February 25, 2004: Message edited by: catrandom ]

bwalsh · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 3:49 am

Yes, you have to love the "How can we make sure this never happens again?" question.Uh, stop publishing a daily newspaper?

vsafuto · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 9:57 am

Glad I was off that night department:I was the senior copy editor at a paper a few years ago, and they sent me home early -- before Page One was finished -- because I was racking up massive amount of OT (I was also business editor, a one-person operation).Anyway, that night the city's police HQ got hit by, you guessed it, "Lightening."I haven't made any major mistakes on headlines, but I've botched my share of deck heds and briefs package headlines. I recently spelled "economy" as "ecomomy" in a briefs package and, last year, reported in a deck hed that bad weather was "threatenening" business.I haven't seen anyone canned for a single mistake, but if it becomes a habit, usually someone upstairs sits up and takes notice.My solution is to get better glasses. (I wasn't senior copy editor due to skill or competence, but because everyone else save one copy editor had left in the two years since my arrival, and the corporate owner didn't want me to leave, so they gave me a tiny raise and a job title) <blockquote>quote:<hr>Originally posted by onelaneroad:
The worst thing that appeared in our paper, at least that I can remember, happened on my one night off. How no one caught this, I don't know ... all I can think is that it's such a basic thing that everyone "read" it correctly when it wasn't. One of our reporters wrote that Africa was a country instead of a continent. I cannot tell you the utter fear and dread I felt when I picked up the paper the next day and read that, and then came in to work only to be greeted by a VERY unhappy EIC and a TON of e-mails.
I kept wondering how the HELL I had missed that. I didn't even remember reading it. And then I realized the reason I didn't remember reading it was because I hadn't; I was off that night.
I still wince when I think about it. No excuse for that one.<hr></blockquote>

Matthew Grieco · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 5:09 pm

<blockquote>quote:<hr>Originally posted by lostinspace:
I haven't made any major mistakes on headlines, but I've botched my share of deck heds and briefs package headlines. I recently spelled "economy" as "ecomomy" in a briefs package and, last year, reported in a deck hed that bad weather was "threatenening" business. <hr></blockquote>From the "Copy Desk Saved Another Desk's Ass and Annoyed the Pressroom Department":A few years back, one of my copy desk colleagues noticed that the weekly health tab cover (which had already been printed after going through the features department with its separate copy desk) featured photos of a bunch of celebrities and the 80-point headline: "WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE IN COMMOM?"My colleague alerted the brass, and the section was rerun. But believe it or not, there was actually debate over whether it was worth rerunning an entire section for this (it was a daytime run in advance for the following day).A final note: The thing those celebrities all had in common -- I jest not -- was dyslexia. For a few minutes we earnestly wondered if the features department was attempting an extremely tasteless joke.

Bumfketeer · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 5:50 pm

I've seen many, but two come to mind right now...one funny, one horrible...and in true copy desk style I will say I had nothing to do with either:My college paper had a lede story on the new college president and his plans for change. Guy's name was Nappo. Hed: Nappo stresses faculty rollNot funny: When I worked in Syracuse we had a front-page color shot of a local Marine being brought home for burial after being killed in the Beirut barracks bombing ('82 or so, before they were a daily event in the Middle East). Front-page cutline, all editions: An honor guard carries the flag-draped coffee of Lance Cpl.........And hey, Pete, would that be someone in Syracuse you were talking about...nyuk, nyuk...

paulwiggins · **Posted:** Wed Feb 25, 2004 10:09 pm

Go the Bumf! Word plays on people's names are not funny. They are insensitive at best and ad hominem at worst.

Matthew Grieco · **Posted:** Thu Feb 26, 2004 3:34 pm

I must be missing something. I thought it was just a typo on "role." Does the name Nappo have some significance I am overlooking?

Bumfketeer · **Posted:** Thu Feb 26, 2004 10:56 pm

No, I meant the "roll" thing. Though Nappo was kind of a funny guy, though.

paulwiggins · **Posted:** Thu Feb 26, 2004 11:03 pm

<blockquote>quote:<hr>Originally posted by Matthew Grieco:
I must be missing something. I thought it was just a typo on "role." Does the name Nappo have some significance I am overlooking?<hr></blockquote>
My mistake, thinking too laterally.

pzicari · **Posted:** Sat Feb 28, 2004 12:35 am

Bumf reminds me of a couple of favorite moments in Syracuse ... Family jewels
found in can
(mercifully caught)and a cutline that identified a softball pitcher as "Jack Meoff," which got through the Regional edition (and drew not a peep of protest). I started collecting not long after that. I like the ones that never got published best; you can use them to prove copy editors do have a function, as well as sharing some yucks.

Bolder1 · **Posted:** Sat Feb 28, 2004 1:13 am

<blockquote>quote:<hr>Originally posted by JonScribe:
[b]To Sri with love.As long as we're posting horrid examples...I once transposed the r and i in Sri Lanka in an 1A hed (below the fold, thankfully).[/b]<hr></blockquote>What the heck was Sri Lanka doing on A1?I once misspelled "Inaugural" in 78p type on A1. It too got through two layers of proofing, but since I was the news editor, the boss called me in to his office, told me to close the door, then said quietly, "This is for effect." He then bellowed "What the HELL were you thinking?", winked at me, then told me not to worry and sent me back out to the (now deathly quiet) newsroom...

Bumfketeer · **Posted:** Sat Feb 28, 2004 7:07 pm

I had a copy of Mr. Meoff for a long time. Wonder if i can still find it.When it was discovered, the name was just scratched out on the plate. For the final run it just said: Pitcher of Mother's Restaurant delivers...

larepublica · **Posted:** Wed Mar 03, 2004 2:30 pm

Case in point-- our paper in today's editions ran a file picture in the sports section of an equestrian rider with the following caption (in Spanish, my translation) "Rider Silvia Brenes will have to jump higher this year because the leadership of the equestrian association, atempting to improve the level of competition, will raise the height of the jumps for the youth levels."
The problem is young little Silvia Brenes died in a car accident over a year ago. Her parents called the paper to complain. Boy am I glad I don't work on the sports desk.[ March 03, 2004: Message edited by: larepublica ][ March 03, 2004: Message edited by: larepublica ]

majorbabs · **Posted:** Wed Mar 03, 2004 3:51 pm

I once happened to stop in to the weekly newspaper during a rare editorial day off, and found that the publishers (very conservative, religious folks) were about to publish a photo of the winners in the local volleyball contest who -- for the express purpose of seeing the publishers embarrassed -- had used the name of a certain sexual act for their team name. (Modesty forbids me from listing it here.)The caption was ready to go to press, when I stopped and, as delicately as I could, explained why they couldn't use that term in a family newspaper. We stopped it but I never want to hold a conversation like that again with a publisher.

Testy Copy Editors

Blowing a major headline..

Who is online

What They're Saying

Useful Links