Mothership lets a racial slur slip in a headline on its mobile browser

http://espn.go.com/blog/poynterreview/

 

I'm surprised that they deemed the 30-day suspension as too severe but not the dismissal.

 

Suspension would have been a fine punishment.

We seriously gotta get over this "heads must roll!" mentality about honest mistakes that do no one any actual (physical or financial) harm, especially in a business that has seen too many heads roll the past four year.

A copy editor at a newspaper would have quietly had the head changed by the slot and perhaps been given a little lecture.

Here, someone gets fired . . . because there was no slot other than the one with the 30-minute delay button.

That makes a lot of sense. :

 

It was a knee-jerk reaction.

 

It's interesting, isn't it?

The Internet is kind of a tweener -- less "permanent" than a printed newspaper, but more permanent than a spoken word -- although obviously, since everything is on tape these days, the spoken word has permanence, too.

 

Fortunately, editors are dispensable so you can easily fire a person for one mistake that likely would have been caught by checks in place in the past.

 

There was? Where did you see that? I am not doubting you, I would just like to read it.

 

It was a stupid headline, no doubt. But desks used to be staffed with the assumption that people would make mistakes and write bad headlines.

Now there's little or no safety net, and you're canned if you screw up.