fun headlines the editors should have caught

When I was in college I was studying a journalism related career that I later changed to a degree in communication which is a vague enough degree that nobody actually knows what it means so it can apply to just about anything. Is it marketing? Is it telecom? Is it journalism? Just say yes no matter what people ask. the real story is that it is a degree in essentially nothing unless you take it upon yourself to try to learn something you are interested in. I was interested in journalism and being part of an editorial staff because in the early 90's, this was still a viable career.

I was the lead editor at my college newspaper and during my semester in this unpaid position I never made any mistakes even close to the ones that I am going to feature below.


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Placeholders are common in media packages and even though I haven't seen any today's I would imagine as time went by that they software would warn you if you hadn't changed the header. The fact that it didn't do that for you back in those days is no good excuse though because if there is one thing an editor worth their salt, or worth having in the position, should catch it is a headline. This is an absurd mistake that would have seen me possibly removed from my position even though I wasn't being paid for it.


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This is just a stupid story and I can't believe that anyone unironically dedicated any time and effort into determining this. What's next? Women prefer attractive men? We'll never know unless someone does a survey!


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There are a number of problems that I have with this story and it doesn't end at the obvious conclusion of the headline. If you look over at the spacing that they did with the words on the left side of the image you will see that "300" was given an entire line of text This is just terrible image placement because when you have to hyphenate almost every word of what you are writing, the image is in the wrong place and you need to move it. This is just extremely lazy on the part of the editorial board. The fact that the headline is stupid is just an afterthought but that is a problem as well.


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While were on the topic of weight and I guess weight-loss and health we need to take a quick look at how you write a good headline. You have to lure your audience in use as few words as possible. It is a bit of an art I guess and I am not going to say that I am a master of it - that was never what I was going for in journalism, but stating the obvious, unless it is done in order to make people laugh at the obvious nature of it, is kind of dumb. You mean eating too much makes me fat? Whodathunkit?


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This one made me smile a bit because well, I can say that if someone tried to actually sneak a misspelling of the actual name of the paper past me when i was an editor, it may have worked simply because that is the one place that I probably never looked. You just assume that is going to be correct because for the most part we were using templates as does most anyone else.

There is another lesson in the above that I think would be wonderful if more of the news people of today could take to heart. It is ok to be wrong from time to time in the news but you have to own your mistakes. All too often, especially these days when quick edits can be done on digital only media sources, news outlets are incredibly reluctant to EVER admit that they made a mistake.

Intentionally screwing up a story because of a political agenda is NOT ok of course, but getting wrapped up in a bogus source every now and then... that is ok provided you are willing to own it after the fact. I truly believe that most people would have a lot more respect for mass media if they were just willing to admit that they, like the rest of us, are fallible. But their complete inability to do this is the reason why nearly all media today is something that I consider to not be news but instead to be completely....


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