This isn't really so much of an issue today since most people get their information from some digital source rather than a book, newspaper, or magazine, but back in the day we read thigs that actually had to be printed. I worked as an editor for free when I was in college and it was for a low-distribution weekly paper but it was still a lot of work and I put a lot into making sure that our end products was the best it could be.
This didn't just incorporate having stories that contained correct spelling and grammar. Another really important aspect of the entire process was the layout itself. I'm certain that this was pretty difficult to pull off back in the day but even when I was doing it in the 90's it was almost entirely digital at that point.
Keeping in mind that I was an unpaid member of a very small team at a low distribution paper. I find these sorts of mistakes in major publications where the staff actually are paid to be kind of unforgiveable. This doesn't mean it can't be funny though.
Yikes. That is a mistake of epic proportions on the front page as well. I would have at least been demoted or reprimanded for this sort of placement mistake.
While I was never involved in the creation or editing of a magazine, I would imagine the process is quite similar in that the editors are given a digital copy and then they make a couple of physical ones to get multiple sets of eyes on to make sure the layout works. How it is that no one caught this says to me that they probably didn't really care about the layout.
You can't help but read between the lines here and I wonder if this was actually intentional on the part of the publisher - just having a laugh at the expense of the public (or perhaps helping them to laugh a bit as well.) I just cant imagine any editor seeing this and not noticing the CUNT there.
4 mistakes on the same page? I think that this almost certainly had to be intentional but at the same time it kind of takes away from the stories about the women that are actual articles on the same page.
While it is funny when this sort of stuff happens, if it was an accident on the part of the various editors I think that I can say from experience that they were not very good at their jobs. For the 6 months or so that I was a chief editor for my college newspaper nothing even close to this ever happened for our publication and all of us were working for free.
These days something like this is unlikely to happen intentionally because online advertising rarely has intentional placement and the producers of articles don't even likely know what advertisement will end up in which location because much of this is determined by what region the reader happens to be in and their own privacy settings / cookies.
While I guess the lack of environmental impact is probably a good thing, I do miss the days of newspapers and magazines - they just felt better... and the mistakes couldn't simply be reworked by a quick edit either. Once those things hit the stands they were out there an there was nothing that could be done to correct it!