What was your biggest goof, typo, etc.?

Unfortunately for another paper, this exact same typo made it to press.

 

Hilarious when one paper, 15 or 20 years ago, ran four grouped mug shots with a baseball story on 1A. Hilarious because the mug shot in the lower-right position, which was supposed to be a color shot of Otis Nixon, was a b/w shot of Richard Nixon. How a news desk could fuck up that badly, I never found out. Can't remember the paper, but I saw it myself.

 

We had "barbecued children" instead of barbecued chicken in a senior center menu.

 

My editor ran a story about a bank robber and said he was wearing a T-shit.

 

All of you have made me feel better already, thank you!

Please, keep these coming... chicken soup for the screw up, are all of you.

 

THAT is one hell of a funny story.

 

One of my first stops, in the first month or so on the job, I wrote a big high school volleyball season advance package. It had the main story, then a sider for the out-of-area teams and the best teams/players, etc.

In the sider, I talked up one of the best players on a fringe team, all of her stats, etc., and then long after it was out of my hands, the desk added a mug shot of a girl from the same school with a somewhat-similar name: Ashley vs. Ashton or something of that ilk. Turns out is was the wrong girl in the mug - and the girl whose mug ran was the older sister of the volleyball player who had graduated a couple of years before. And this girl whose picture was in the paper in the volleyball advance was born without arms.

Not my mistake, but when the mother came storming into the office the next day snorting fire, guess who was there to be on the receiving end?

 

Crappy for scrappy inside of quote marks.

I was never called about yardage, scoring plays or how much a player scored, but missing that "s..." Well the coach and I had a good laugh about it afterwards. Thank God.

 

Colton, yours is a relatively minor mistake, except of course to those rabid hunters.

Consider this one instead: About 15 years ago at the sports desk of a major Midwest metro paper, they ran a file photo of a hunter holding up a turkey in a story announcing the start of turkey season. They identified the guy in the cutline, of course, saying something like: "Joe Shlabotnick holds up the 30-pound turkey he bagged last year," etc. ... The next week, the paper gets a letter saying: "Thank you for running the photo of my husband, Joe, in Sunday's paper. He would have loved seeing it again, but he died a few months ago."

Pretty good story when the widow handles it so nicely.

 

Not newspaper but radio. Was doing a coaches show for the women's soccer team. Had the coach and keeper on the show. I asked the player what the process was like being recruited by the coach. Turns out she had walked on.

In fairness 1. She was in her third year and her profile on team website made no mention of her walking on originally (she was on scholarship when I asked) 2. It was women's soccer

Still, to make such a dumb error sucked but to make the error while sitting face to face with the subjects made it horrible.

 

Once ran a photo from an NBA game that was played the previous night with a live gamer AND misspelled Pau Gasol (well, AP did that, but I didn't catch it).

My biggest screw-up was when the Red Sox finally won their first World Series in eons. That December, in our Year in Review spread (remember those?), I ran a photo of some Red Sox fans standing on the edge of Sox billboard celebrating as the main image on the double-truck (so, quite large). On closer inspection, which I found out the next day, one of the fans had a beer in one hand and was flipping the bird with the other. Our sports editor was not too happy. At all.

Have also had more than one run in with the "1-2 c--t" in MLB stories. Always give the guys a bit of ribbing for those.

 

Another of my favorites, reportedly from 1984. This is a recap found on the Internet:

Jon Young, the photographer at the Crystal Lake (Ill.) Herald had just gotten out of the darkroom after printing up a photo of a surprise spring snowfall of several inches in a couple hours. He wrote a cutline, but could not get the weather service to return his call asking for an official statement on inches. Jon took off for dinner.

The number arrived after he left, and was inserted by a rushed reporter. When Jon called later to see if there were any questions for him, he was told there were none. The cutline was pasted up thusly:

"Arthur Loy, foreground, and his mother, Judy, used teamwork Sunday to clear their sidewalk of nearly seven inches of snow that fell Saturday evening. Though a shitload of snow fell Saturday, snowplow crews had most major streets cleared by Sunday."