mistakes

[greenlantern]

Maybe someone started a threat about this before, but I'm not about to search the archives to see if this is a repeat thread.

What is the weirdest or most bizarre mistake that you've personally seen make it to print. I've got a couple of examples:

1) This made the front of the sports section in the left rail. I've decided to remove the names:
"XXX, a former XXX standout, set XXX's single-season block record with six blacks in a win ..."

2) This was buried in a jump but probably even better. In a quote by a female basketball player about her speed, the reporter left out the very important preposition "past." The quote: "I blow people."

 

[forever_town]

In a student newspaper piece that was giving the biographical information about Student Governance Board members at my community college:

"Below is the biological information about the candidates."

One year, courtesy of an editor who refused to listen to the rest of her staff, the same paper ran a huge headline with the name Jessie Jackson for the founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

 

[shotglass]

Best I've seen is the use of "DUMMY" for a nameline on George Bush. The older one.

 

[ADifferentOkie]

I'm sure someone will post it, but there has been a scan put on here of a cutline that includes "Some ****er."

 

[In Cold Blood]

I think story has been shared on here by a former classmate, but I'll tell it again.
When I worked for my school paper, a kid was studying abroad in Cuba and emailed in a column. He'd put the column into the body of the email, and above it wrote something to the effect of "here's the column, PEACE OUT *******"...

The person paginating that day simply copied and pasted the entire body of the email into the quark page, leaving PEACE OUT ******* for the world to see in the paper the next day.

Boy, was our professor pissed.

 

[Corky Ramirez up on 94th St.]

Close to 30 years ago, our paper reported "Bishop holds cookout at church bazaar"...except replaced one of the o's in cookout with a c. You can probably guess which 'o' I'm talking about.

We've also forgotten the 'l' in public, but I'm guessing we weren't the first, nor are we the last.

Other ones I've seen...'It's deva ju all over again'...'Suicide bomber strikes again'...

 

[slappy4428]

I once worked with a guy who spelled shiite with one i

 

[Monday Morning Sportswriter]

I put Birth Notices under a Death Notices heading.

 

[Ace]

I once worked with a guy who spelled shiite with one i

Holy suni!

 

[crusoes]

One of our weeklies, talking about a homecoming king, had a reference to the royal sphincter.

We laughed for weeks, both in hilarity and relief.

 

[SF_Express]

I think mispelling "memento" on the front page (A1, which sports copy editors rarely did) of a top 20 metro daily has to qualify.

 

[GB-Hack]

I can't remember what paper it was, I think it might have been The Times of London, but I saw a clipping from it in a magazine I get from England.

The headline for the story was "Headline for xxxx story goes here, cheers".

 

[Stone Cane]

wrong dateline

NFL road game

absentmindedly datelined it as a home game

it ran

 

[Bob Slydell]

I had that a kid ****, instead of hit, back-to-back buckets once.

 

[txsportsscribe]

deion sanders had a bulging **** in his back several years ago in a small north texas cnhi daily.

 

[Pencil Dick]

Not mine, thank God, but the February 21, 1997, Sports section of the Gallatin (Tenn.) News Examiner is in a class by itself.

That mistake only cost the owners $800,000 after the courts got through hearing the case.

There's a copy of it on my desk somewhere. Right next to the "Swallows-Cox" wedding announcement that Leno wouldn't run, though someone on his staff wrote back that they wish they could.

 

[GB-Hack]

Not mine, thank God, but the February 21, 1997, Sports section of the Gallatin (Tenn.) News Examiner is in a class by itself.

That mistake only cost the owners $800,000 after the courts got through hearing the case.

There's a copy of it on my desk somewhere. Right next to the "Swallows-Cox" wedding announcement that Leno wouldn't run, though someone on his staff wrote back that they wish they could.

It doesn't say what was said, but here's the AP report on the closing of the case.

GALLATIN, Tenn. (AP) -- A former Gallatin High School student and his ex-soccer coach so far have been awarded $650,000 in a libel lawsuit against The News Examiner and owner Gannett Co. Inc.

The suit stemmed from a story published in The News Examiner on Feb. 21, 1997, that included a fabricated quote attributed to coach Rufus Lassiter. The statement included a sexually explicit reference to Garrett Dixon Jr.

The quote was inserted by former reporter Nick DeLeonibus. He said he was trying to play a joke on sports editor Kris Freeman and never intended for the vulgarity to remain in the article.

But Freeman never edited the story, and it was included in the next paper. Upon receiving complaints, News Examiner employees collected as many copies as they could from home delivery and street boxes.

The newspaper printed a front-page apology in its next issue and also printed an apology by DeLeonibus, who was fired.

After more than a week of testimony, the Sumner County Circuit Court jury decided Tuesday that Dixon will receive $500,000 in compensatory damages. The amount of punitive damages was to be decided today.

Lassiter, now assistant principal at Gallatin High, will receive $150,000 in compensatory damages and no punitive damages.

Dulin Kelly, Dixon's lawyer, told the court The News Examiner was more concerned about ''profit over safety'' and refused ''to accept responsibility.''

News Examiner attorney Richard Batson told the court Lassiter had not suffered any damage to his reputation because of the story. Lassiter was promoted to assistant principal months after the story was published.

Dixon graduated from Gallatin High last spring.[quote/]

 

[GBNF]

Re: Galatin, for those like myself who had no clue...

http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jun/1/127184.html

 

[Pencil Dick]

Aren't these Internets great?

I'll post the actual article later if I get time.

 

[Pencil Dick]

The Cliff's Note version, sans details (I do seem to recall the phrase "goat ****er" being included):

A statement inserted in the dummy copy of a small-town newspaper in Tennessee resulted in major liability for that paper. In 1997, the Gallatin News Examiner, a tri-weekly paper, ran an article about a local high school soccer player named Garrett "Bubba" Dixon, Jr. In an early draft of the article the reporter, Nick DeLeonibus, inserted quotes attributed to the high school soccer coach charging Dixon, in extremely explicit language that would otherwise have been unfit for publication, of bestiality and unsanitary habits. This was an ongoing joke between reporter DeLeonibus and his editor in which such quotes would be inserted into the article by the reporter to see if the editor caught on. The joke bombed. The editor missed the quotes in this edition, the quotes remained in the final product, and both the soccer player and coach sued. Despite the newspaper's arguments that the statements could not be understood as statements of fact, a Tennessee jury awarded the player, Dixon, $550,000 in compensatory and $300,000 in punitive damages against the News Examiner. The coach received $150,000 in compensatory damages from the paper.