I have mentioned as a precursor to many of the blog posts I do that I was an unpaid editor for a small-circulation newspaper back in the 90's and even though I received no pay, I took my job very seriously. Back then we did have some technology to assist us in checking mistakes but not anywhere near the level that we have now. Mostly, it was left up to the eyes and minds of the staff to make sure that misspellings, bad grammar, and poor image placement didn't happen. Bad headlines were the easiest to check because they are much bigger than the rest of the print.
These mistakes happened in major newspapers where most if not all of the staff were presumably paid. I would have at least been demoted if any of these had made it past me when I was the chief editor at a newspaper with a circulation of around 35,000 units a week.
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This is from a website, not a newspaper (obviously) and although this actually is the names of the two people involved, perhaps Reuters should have used their first names as well rather that post this. It's so bad actually, that it is difficult for me to believe that it wasn't done on purpose.
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This is also from a major news website in California. Now the name "Sharts" is actually the unfortunate surname of one of their players whose first name is Hannah. Certainly the publisher and editor are very aware of the other meaning of "Sharts" and realize that it might have been a good idea to use her real name. Again, I have a hard time believing that this wasn't intentional on their part. If anything it probably resulted in a lot more clicks than the site would have normally got.
Imagine if your last name was "Sharts?" Good grief.
This is from an actual newspaper and it appears to be from a time when having a headline of such an egregious nature would not result in additional sales because of clicks probably not existing at the time. There are a ton of words they could have used other than "lick" such as defeats, destroys, thrashes, wins over.... ok, nevermind... based on the supposed reputation of Bill Clinton I don't suppose there is a way they could have done this better :)
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This is from a Pittsburgh print newspaper back in 2008. Everyone knows who A-Rod is but Wang (Taiwanese player Chien-Ming Wang) might be a bit less known. The inclusion of the rest of his name would have made this headline a lot less hilarious but then again, perhaps these guys in charge are actually using these opportunities to have some fun at work. I would have been fired for it.
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This one comes from one of those free newspapers that was 90% advertisements that we probably all remember if we are old enough. Turns out they had this garbage in Australia as well. This was a publication called mX that was apparently handed out to train commuters and this was their final publication as they were shutting down operations the following week. There is no proof of it, but I would be willing to bet that since they had no money, and were already planning on going out of business, that they decided to do this on purpose.
I would have caught all of these things as an unpaid editor back in the 90's and even though I was (apparently) much better at my job than the people running these shows, I couldn't find a job in publishing after college. Perhaps it is a good thing that I couldn't because that industry doesn't really exist anymore and I probably would be right where I am now anyway even if I had been offered a job post-college.
These days people can fix their headlines in a flash since most publications don't exist on paper at all but back in the day, once the paper went to print, that was it! There was no way of getting them back to correct them and in my 1.5 years working at the paper I was employed by, we had to do very little in the way of retractions and corrections. To this day I am quite proud of this.
I hope you got a chuckle out of these, because I sure did.
