What was your biggest goof, typo, etc.?

The photo in question. Turns out, he's flipping TWO birds. oops.

http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=eJW&sa=X&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&biw=1280&bih=921&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnsb&tbnid=sGqdvODXZiaqJM:&imgrefurl=http://lushess.com/sox/alcs_2004/general3.html&docid=oZA9sZs8ZMhi1M&imgurl=http://lushess.com/sox/alcs_2004/keep_the_faith.jpg&w=400&h=260&ei=ku15UNL3FcSI0QHFioHwAQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=367&vpy=157&dur=2111&hovh=181&hovw=279&tx=165&ty=112&sig=101464511475196962541&page=1&tbnh=137&tbnw=201&start=0&ndsp=26&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0,i:74

 

Oh man, I forgot about the time I put a dead girl in a volleyball box score. Died before the season, team kept her on the roster in memorium, the other team's No. 3 had a dig that I put on the wrong side of my stat sheet...

 

We had an all-county soccer player on our team who had graduated the year before.

 

This happen to be the Little 500 guide? Not sure, but it sounds eerily familiar. Had to put that thing together at the IDS in my time there, both as an editor and writer. It was a beast, 24 pages for two beat writers, but I heard way back when the thing was even more of a monster.

 

Jeez, can the site managers find a better way to handle those long URLs? Some kind of automatic wrap adjustment or something?

 

We did a special section in the aftermath of the Montreal Olympics because we had free access to photos from a local photographer.
One photo was of a guy outside Olympic Stadium, holding a bunch of tickets above his head. The generic caption said, "A scalper sells tickets outside Olympic Stadium."
Well, we're about 3,000 miles from Montreal, but it turned out the "scalper" was from our city and he happened to work at a bar called Sweeney Todd's Pub.
A guy from Sweeney Todd's being called a "scalper" wound up with us being sued.
After all the lawyers had a good laugh, the guy settled for a printed retraction.

 

Already been mentioned, but when referring to a county high school, I once left out the "o" in (name) County High. My editor caught it. It's happened a few other times, but I caught them in the editing process.

 

At another stop, we had a woman whose last name was "Count" who was always in the bowling scores that we took by phone way back then. She always called in the scores and was far from pleasant, polite or easy to deal with on the phone.

One night, one of our clerks left the "o" out of her name, "by accident" of course. When this woman went nuts and called all the paper's big bosses to raise a shit-fit, our executive editor came stomping back ready to bust some people's asses wide open for it. Then he found out it was his daughter, who was working part-time as a clerk/town whore at the time, who took the call and typed up the scores.

Suddenly it wasn't that big a deal anymore.

 

Your executive editor was a whore, too.

 

We don't have an editor, so we do our own copy edit and working as much as we used to, did it as we put the story on the page. Rare was the time where we printed proofs and edited.
One of the times we did saved me from what would have been the most embarrassing gaffe I could think of.
Talking about a girls - girls - lacrosse team's struggle to play with a lead, I wrote they had 'trouble working the clock.' The L wasn't on the page. For whatever reason, I decided that day to print and read my pages. Found the type minutes before deadline.

 

Putting my All-Area football team together last year I had a fringe team that put three guys on the All-State team the AP put out so I included them in my team. It turned out one of the guys, an offensive lineman, didn't actually go to the fringe school, but a school with a similar sounding name on the other side of the state. AP listed him as from our area and I hadn't covered the school that year so I didn't know it was an error. Coach was not amused.