Corrections of the year

My favorite's down the list a little bit, from the Guardian.

"We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30."

 

I feel terrible whenever someone kindly points out a mistake...

My favorite is the one about Anna Nicole Smith and that when then Playboy scout spotted her she could "barely right a sentance." Brilliant.

 

The Guardian has a reputation as being error-riddled in Britain, so much so that the papers pet name is The Grauniad.

 

The competitor in our town did a season preview 18 or 20 years ago. They did a "swimmers to watch" breakout box obviously just derived from agate of previous year's league championship meets. One of the kids they listed died over the summer in a traffic accident that eventually led to arrests and lawsuits. Kid was identifed as deceased at least five times in our paper and another five in theirs between the time of the accident and the sorry-ass preview.

 

The closest I can come to that is the community college rag where I got my start. Instead of writing, "Below is the biographical information about the candidates" for a piece on Student Governance Board candidates, they used the word "biological."

I made one hell of a blunder earlier this year. I wrote a column in which I basically called a guy a crook when he hadn't been indicted. That cuts way beyond serious fuck up.

 

Here's your winner:

New York Daily News:

A HEADLINE in Monday’s Daily News, “He regrets his role in ‘postal’ vid,” implied that Richard Marino, the subject of a YouTube video, was sorry for an incident in December at a Brooklyn post office. Marino, in fact, is not sorry. The News regrets the error.

 

Only I knew why it was so terrible, but still ...

"In a story on Such and Such Date, the Bumblefuck Rag reported the wrong year that was the last time Area School failed to win its conference football championship."

Why so stupid?
I played on the team that last failed to win the conference football championship.
Doubly painful.

We have a great running joke on our staff between myself and two colleagues over the dumbest mistakes we've made. The aformentioned is mine; another got the final score wrong in a Big Ten football gamer; the other may be the winner: he has misspelled his own name in his byline ... twice.

 

I once worked with a copy editor who called a guy who was practicing medicine without a license a "fake doctor" in a headline. The guy was in fact licensed to practice medicine, just not in our state.

Almost 20 years later, and the copy editor was still paying for the six-figure settlement out of his paycheck to the tune of $25 per week.

 

One of my journalism profs told me about a former student that he had who did something similar but on a news broadcast. That one is a classic.

 

Boston Herald had a high school preview this spring on one of the girls' sports. Under the "players to watch" was listed a girl who'd died in the off-season.

 

I've posted this on here before, but I once wrote an advance on a game involving West Virginia, only I called it Virginia Tech on every reference throughout the entire story.

 

When I was an editor at a weekly, a reporter referred to a coach named Pat as "she" throughout a girls basketball preview. Pat was a 60-year-old man.

I don't know what was worse: The fact that the reporter didn't know the sex of the coach, the fact that I totally missed it or dealing with the irate/unbalanced parent who pointed the error out. Ugh.