The fallout from sportswriting's filthiest @#$%-up

Couple of memories from my longtime former employer ...

One close call occurred when I was a news slot working with a designer on the local section. This designer also had been assigned to put together one of those going-away fake 1As for a departing employee (was common practice back then and I never thought those were really that funny, but my opinion was in the minority). But our system was relatively new and prone to hiccups that occasionally screwed things up after stories were edited and shipped, and some of the going-away-page type wound up being inserted into a 1B story on local government. Wasn't anything really racy in the going-away type -- just some silliness and inside jokes -- but we still would've gotten in trouble had it not been caught on the proof.

And old-timers still chortle about an ad goof that happened there seven or eight years before my time. One of the drugstore chains ran an ad promoting several discounts, one of which was for the Tussy deodorant brand. Well, the unthinkable happened and "T" became "P." Someone from editorial saw this at the last minute, but it was too late by then and the ad ran in all its glory. Lots of reader feedback on that one! And I'm told the only person with the paper reprimanded for it -- a non-editorial screwup -- was the night editor in charge, who was lambasted for not calling the ME and publisher upon seeing the ad at 1 a.m.

 

A photographer at a former place of employee took a picture of the head honchos of a car dealership donating a Dodge Neon for a hole-in-one prize at a local golf tournament.

He wrote Cheapass Dodge Neon in the cutline.

Who wants to guess if it made it into the paper?

He was canned. Copy editor who put it in earned a one-week suspension. Her defense was that she thought Cheapass was just the brand of car.

It made Jay Leno's show. Pre-widespread Internet, so there's only like one online reference.

 

Philadlephia. Philadlephia. Philadlephia.

My fingers can't help it. Philadlephia.

 

I remember this guy being a running joke on Letterman for weeks:

 

He died a year ago yesterday.

 

I found out about that one when I started working there and it came up in conversation. Long before I'd ever heard of Reddit, a co-worker pulled it out of his desk drawer to show it to me. IIRC, it was a piece of stand-alone art as part of a Life/Weekend package of upcoming events. The sting of it was still pretty fresh in the newsroom.

 

I work in Mississippi, and every time I have to write that in a headline or a story I slow down and count the letters. One of my greatest fears as a journalist is giving an already afflicted state an even worse name by being the guy who can't even spell that name correctly.

"Seahawks" also gives me fits. I have to slow down or I'll transpose the a and the h every time.

 

Oh, typing bugaboos like that drive me crazy. Melancholy is one those for me. It turns into melancholoy, or some sort of alloy.

 

Oh god, the noise I made when I read "Malcolm the Tenth"...it was like whale song. That broke me.

 

My previous shop ran both Packers and Lions AP stories, normally throwing in the Friday night advances for NFL games. I accidentally ran a Lions advance for the previous week's game because it was still in the folder.

My best catch probably came during an internship. Features writer did a thing during the 2005 NBA Finals about this group of local kids who had potlucks during Pistons playoff games. They sent a photographer and all the kids posed shirtless doing a hand sign.

It was what is now commonly known as "the shocker." Our paper ran it fairly small, two columns, I think, but it got picked up as a state AP exchange story. I told my boss, "I don't think that's good." Later that day, the Free Press ran it six columns across the B section of its early edition. Soon after, AP issued the PHOTO ELIMINATION (love that term). I picked up a copy of the Freep at the local newsstand. Later on, my managing editor asked to see it. I never got it back.

The funny thing is I became that paper's resident obscene gesture expert for the rest of the summer, which is funny considering I'm about as square as they come.

In my tenure on this hub, my best one was a story on a sister's paper's front page about rebuilding an earthen embankment, except they spelled it 'dyke.'

 

"Destined for Fucking Mediocrity" made it in the summer softball agate. That was the official team name, but it was obviously shortened in all previous editions. Nobody got fired for that, but several of us were grilled about what happened. I had to explain that we don't read every word of 6-pt. type on that full page.

We knew the part-timer who did it -- kind of immature like the dude in the story -- but we couldn't prove it. It didn't happen again.