What was your biggest goof, typo, etc.?

A neighboring paper printed "Horse Play" as a header for a photo of a horseman at a military funeral.

We had an editor put a header of "Afternoon Delight" on a photo of kids playing in the park, swearing she didn't know what the phrase really referred to.

Another paper ran the wrong mugshot with an article about a high school football coach caught in a sex scandal. Both guys had the same name.

On a USC football wrap-up article years ago, my headline read "Smith's Trojans withstand year of ups and downs." That was caught in paste up.

 

Once worked at a paper where the backshop swapped same-sized photos of Dale Murphy and one of the horses in a Triple Crown race that year. The guy who was supposed to check the pages after they were printed ... didn't.

 

That one isn't so bad. Better safe than sorry, I guess.

 

So, when does Rick Reilly get on here and talk about picking up an Onion-esque website's anecdote?

 

What the heck, I'll play.

Many years ago, when I was SE at a small weekly, I wrote a weekly column. One week, long before his troubles began, I decided to write about Tiger Woods.

However, I wrote the column at 4 a.m. on very little coffee and instead of Tiger Woods, I wrote Tiger Williams.

Throughout the entire column.

Two others read the column before it went to press, but neither of them were sports people, and the mistake was never caught.

Two days after the paper came out, my hubby and I were at a local establishment when a friend of ours, who managed the local golf course, came in. He looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, "Tiger WILLIAMS?"

That was when I realized what a idiotic mistake I made.

So the next week's column was about how I mixed up a professional golfer with a former NHLer.

 

Slightly different category here. Not a typo or factual error but a major major major lapse in judgment that, to this day, stands not only as the stupidest thing I've done in journalism, but perhaps the stupidest thing I've done in my life....

I was 21 years old and interning for a major metro. I had been there maybe 6 weeks. I was out to cover a high school football game on a Friday afternoon and I was back in the office writing the story. Central High had an awesome offensive line and running back so they simply ran the ball every play and marched down the field over and over.

So, I thought it would be really funny to write a joke lede and put it in notes font.

"Why does Central High run on every play? For the same reason a dog licks its balls... because it can."

The first desker who read this -- a woman -- simply stood up, walked into the boss office, and then he called me into his office. I was still sitting right there, so it's not even like I had the cover of being out.

For at least a week after this, I was physically ill from the guilt I felt for such stupidity. I thought I'd ruined my career before it even started. I have no idea what possessed me to think that anyone would be amused by the 21-year-old intern doing something like this.

 

One of our spellcheck greatest hits was Warlock Dunn.

Few years ago, we had Baptits instead of Baptist in a prep football gamer.

 

Not mine but I still give him crap about it every once and awhile ...

Our MAC school traveled to play Nebraska in football. Throughout the article he misspelled Callahan, as in Bill Callahan, Nebraska head coach and a former NFL head coach.

 

Anybody can forget to place a jump inside the paper after starting it on the front, but I once rolled a paper with an inside jump for a story we'd moved off the front to another non-jumped spot. So there was this "mystery jump" inside.