Notice a few problems with this page?

3-4 hours -- a trip from San Francisco to go skiing in Tahoe. Is driving in a NASCAR race much, much, much, ... much, much, much more difficult than driving from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe? Of course.

Does it require you to jump any higher? Or run any faster? Or be any stronger? No. Does it require you to be any more athletic? Not in the least bit.

Auto racing is difficult. Very difficult. And very skillful. So is calculus and phyics. But calculus and physics are sports either.

Thank god the only auto racing in the papers here, and there are a lot of papers here, are briefs on the scoreboard page.

 

You suck, PEteacher. You suck.

And the V-P sucks even worse if this got to print in the fashion shown here.

 

I consider myself lucky. On the one night per week I design, if an error gets past three levels of editing, the press guys will catch it. They read the stories right off the damn negatives. Good guys.

But, yeah, that's a major fuck up. If it were a small daily or weekly, I'd say that it maybe got one read before being sent, but for a paper that size, there's just no excuse.

 

If the page was designed in inDesign, it could happen and happen fairly easily.
I don't understand the technical aspects, but basically elements from an earlier edition could be pulled onto the new page with new items, so you have this mix of old and new.
So you could have a fresh layout with everything updated and the proof will be correct and the screen image will be correct. When it goes to the backshop, it will be good on their computer, and on their color proof, but when it goes to make the plate, it will get screwy.
I don't know if that is what happened, but I know it has happened at my shop. So I feel some of the pain.
Best guess is that the newsroom, is in a different building than the press at the Pilot and they don't send a desker to do a press check. Or they might have and it may not have been a sports person. Just didn't know any better.
And...
Dear Pilot
I hate it when papers have the look of a package with the gamer and a column with a banner head across the top, then it turns out that the column is unrelated.
It is poor design and you know. That should have been one of the times you told the consultant "NO!!!"

 

I wouldn't be too smug about criticizing these kinds of mistakes. You do this long enough and you know shit happens. If it hasn't happened to you a few times, don't worry, it will. You feel like a moron for a while, but experience tells you that the job is bigger than any of us and that there are nights when late-ending games, late-, long- and unintelligibly-filing writers, understaffing, computer problems, bad photos and your own limitations team up in a perfect storm to make you look stupid. It doesn't mean you suck, it means you sucked that night.

 

Thank you, Frank.

 

I would imagine that in Virginia, NASCAR is more popular to the readers than the NBA. That's what stuck out to me, along with the mistakes.

 

Does anyone else have a problem with the fact that the blog guy's column has nothing to do with the banner headline that's above it ... that took me a few doubletakes to figure out it wasn't related to the NBA finals package ... weird design ...

 

The Virginian Pilot is 3 1/2-4 hours away from D.C., the closest NBA city. If the Wizards were in the NBA Finals, MAYBE they'd cover it. That's a big maybe, even, because I don't think they do much with the Wizards to begin with.

 

does anyone have a connect over there to determine if this is the actual page that went to press. cause if not, what a waste of a fuckin thread.

 

As I said previously, I have no idea how many (if any) made print, but the pages that are put on the Internet ARE read. It's one of the sites where you can click on the story off of the layout and read it in another browser window. So even if it didn't make print, it was there for the Internet reader. True, it's not nearly as important as the print version.

Is it possible to point out an error without being accused of being smug? Geez. Of course we've all made stupid mistakes.

 

Frank is right -- this perfect storm happens, and it happens all too often because some of us are careless, clueless or just plain ol' rushed.