Um, That’s Not What I Meant To Say: When Headlines Go Awry
Whether created by tired students or professional editors, sometimes headlines have bold errors
In college, when I was editor of the campus newspaper, creating headlines for our news stories was the last part of the job. It was the cherry on our sundae; we had a little fun with them sometimes after long, long nights of production.
We pulled all-nighters each Wednesday night to get the paper produced. We did everything in our newsroom ourselves, from reporting and writing, to typing the stories into the machines, developing the photos in the darkroom, creating the pages by hand, then handing off a box filled with our precious cargo to a driver, who delivered it to the printer an hour or so away. The printed newspaper appeared back on campus early Thursday evening.
Writing headlines was a job I haven’t thought about in a while, but an article I read in the paper recently about typos sent me back to the production room of the campus newspaper in Oswego, NY, to the days when I was the newly minted “Arts and Entertainment” editor.
Back in the “old days,” after we laid out a story on the blue-lined dummy sheets, we typed a headline on a very high-tech (for 1981) headline-making machine, and printed out a one-inch wide strip of captivating text on specially-coated paper. We ran it through a hot wax machine, sliced it up with Exacto knives as needed, and placed it carefully on the page.
These waxed strips of paper stuck to everything, and I would find them on the bottoms of all my shoes and in my notebooks.
While nothing can match the New York Post's famous “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” I tried to be creative. There are two times I remember where I really fell short.
Jazz Guitarist Pat Metheny had performed in concert the very first week I was responsible for the Arts section. A reporter and a photographer had covered the concert and had submitted a review. My headline on the article declared, “Pat Metheny Sings at Crowded Campus Bar.” Pat Metheny was, apparently, purely an instrumentalist. My bad.
The other mistake was a flat out typo. It had something to do with a review of an event in what I called “Greeenwich Village” with just one too many vowels. For weeks, friends at the paper ribbed me about it, and drew out their vowels in conversation.
Somewhere in my attic I have a box with bound editions of all the issues of the newspaper I worked on during college. After my stint as the Arts editor, I was managing editor my junior year, and then editor-in-chief my senior year. If I dug a little, I’m sure I would have plenty more examples of poor copy editing.
The irony is that now I am the typo police. Typos jump out at me. I have shared some particularly egregious ones on my social media pages when I see them.
It’s a dangerous job to have, because as the typo police when I make one (and I do make them) friends point them out to me somewhat gleefully.
Nowadays, even though spellcheck and those ubiquitous squiggly red lines are designed to catch mistakes, plenty slip through throughout mainstream media.
Here are a few fun ones I came across. Hard to believe, but they all actually ran in newspapers:
Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police
Breathing Oxygen Linked to Staying Alive
Teen Pregnancy Drops Significantly After Age 20
Marijuana Issue Sent to Joint Committee
World Bank Says Poor Need More Money
One-Armed Man Applauds Kindness of Strangers
Woman Missing Since She Got Lost
Most Earthquake Damage Caused by Shaking
Students Cook and Serve Grandparents
Amphibious Pitcher Makes Debut
Let me know if you come across any good ones.
#writing #editing #headlines #newspapers #writingheadlines #typos #checkyourwork