Speaking of bad headlines ...

For the love of God, I hope that was rhetorical.

 

I'm so busy putting these jazzy rout outs on the page, I haven't got all the lingo down.

 

What was "Tim" thinking. He should have saw the dummy type in the cutline.

 

Yes - there are enough folks on the desk to actually proof pages on deadline. Whomever is paginating the page should send out a proof (a plain paper copy usually on 11x17 paper) for someone on the desk to look at before it gets sent to the presses. On my desk we've caught many mistakes on the proof -- seeing it on a printed page that we missed when editing it on the system we've got.

 

Why? You didn't like the close-in crop of the volleyball player's vagina? I thought that was fantatic.

 

When you're on the main page of SportsJournalists.com, this thread reads as Speaking of bad head. Just thought I'd point that out.

 

Thanks, D_B.

 

Dammit! Yeah, I was not so much with the reading of the whole thread.

 

That this process even needs to be described shows a sad state of affairs.

 

Surely this was an example of the wrong page accidentally being sent, right? I can't imagine even the page designer not noticing one of the main headlines reading what it does.
Also, apparently this page wasn't spellchecked because obviously "hed" would've come up. But maybe it was like the people at my old shop that would click insanely fast through the spellchecker so they could mark off on the checklist that they did in fact spellcheck it, even if they didn't catch anything.

 

Angola is right. The wrong pages were sent to the presses.

Our paper has four editions, and each page in our Harris system is unique to its edition. When one deadline passes, a copy of the page is made for the next edition. The first edition has a 6:45 p.m. deadline. The mistake ran in that edition, was caught on proofs post-deadline and when early versions of that edition came off the presses.

For the second edition -- deadline 11:10 -- everything was fixed, proofed, sent, and verified on the early press runs of that edition. Not great, but getting it corrected quickly seemed like ok damage control.

Meanwhile, the mistake-filled first edition page had somehow gotten copied to the third and fourth edition pages in our computer system. That's what took it from bad to worse. The editors had seen the fixes made, and seen it on the presses in the second edition. With nothing changing, it was assumed all was well. ... The next morning's papers served as the "don't assume anything" hammer. The wrong pages got sent, while the correct page sat idly on one Harris page.

That's all I know, and as I am on vacation, all I'm comfortable saying, out of respect for my colleagues.

 

I can imagine all of that, and I do, because I've seen designers do it time and time again.

At one place, I used to get "Xxxxxxxx" all the time in display type. Any time the fucktards couldn't figure out a headline or a refer, they'd leave Xs. Then we'd have a throwdown, and they'd do things right for a few days before going back to the same shit.

I also know they wouldn't run spellcheck. Finally they were told in no uncertain terms they would be written up for any misspelled words or typos that appeared in display type. This included "Xxxxxxxx." Of course, the first day one went through, so the guy claimed his spellcheck hadn't caught it.