Posted on 10/18/2003 7:51:15 AM PDT by Libloather
Paper accidentally publishes losing editorial
Friday, October 17, 2003
Associated Press
NEW YORK -- The curse of the Bambino struck the New York Post, too.
On the morning after the New York Yankees vanquished the Boston Red Sox to win the American League pennant, some editions of the Post carried an editorial bemoaning a loss for the Bronx Bombers.
"The Yankees couldn't get the job done," read the editorial. "...The hitting fell short and the bullpen simply didn't deliver. It's a crying shame that Roger Clemens' career had to end on a losing note."
Clemens, the Yankees' 41-year-old pitcher, will be one of the starters when the Yankees take on the Florida Marlins in the World Series.
Post Editor in Chief Col Allan blamed the foul-up on a simple production error.
"We had prepared two editorials, one in the event of the Yankees winning, one with the Yankees losing," he said. "When we transmitted the pages to our printing facility, the wrong button was struck and the wrong editorial sent."
The mistake was caught and corrected in later editions. But City Council Speaker Gifford Miller -- the target of another editorial in Friday's paper -- waved an oversized copy of the Post gaffe at a Yankees pep rally at City Hall.
Its headline: "A Curse of Their Own?"
Unbeknownst to me, the very next morning the day-shift proofreader took one look at my handiwork and ordered the word CENSORED to be set in the largest type available and pasted on the ad exactly where I had written it. It got all the way to the platemaking room before some alert individual said, "whoa, wait a minute here!" and saved the day (and probably the company).
That night when I came to work I was greeted by the night manager, who curtly threw the layout down in front of me and spoke but three, brief words: "THIS MUST STOP."
Newspapers have to prepare certain things ahead of time, given the lead time needed to write articles/editorials, have them copy edited, sent to layout and then to the presses.
When I was a sportswriter at a chain of Gannett papers, Saturdays in the Fall were hell. After covering football games, we had to come back to the office -- usually bet. 4-5 p.m. -- write the game story, put together the stats into an agate file and answer a flood of phone calls with game reports and scores from the zillions of games we couldn't cover, etc. So, we had to have just about everything (the articles on the games we covered, the shorter articles on the ones phoned in and all the agate) ready to roll by 7 p.m. in order to make the deadline for the earliest edition.
Unbeknownst to me, the very next morning the day-shift proofreader took one look at my handiwork and ordered the word CENSORED to be set in the largest type available and pasted on the ad exactly where I had written it. It got all the way to the platemaking room before some alert individual said, "whoa, wait a minute here!" and saved the day (and probably the company).
That night when I came to work I was greeted by the night manager, who curtly threw the layout down in front of me and spoke but three, brief words: "THIS MUST STOP."
That reminds me of two stories.
1) When laying out the next day's paper, there was a color picture of the Pope signing something and instead of putting in the correct cutline, someone typed in some quasi-dummy text -- just enough to look legit -- "Pope signs yada yada yada." It made it into the first *two* editions the next morning and became something of a collector's item around the newsroom.
2) One of the guys in my department was in the middle of writing a story and left his desk to go to the bathroom or something, leaving his unfinished story on the computer screen. So, the department wise ass comes up and inserts one sentence into the middle of it: "I like little boys."
For some reason, the first guy never read over his story before submitting it to the copy desk. Fortunately, that didn't make it into the next day's paper.
There was a case awhile ago where an on-line editorial had some rather "interesting" commentary in HTML comment tags. Anyone remember that?
I've also seen web sites in which the designers or designer and programmer have made snotty notes to each in the comments section.
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