What was your biggest goof, typo, etc.?

Back when I wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times, I did a piece on a female announcer joining the White Sox broadcast staff. That was unusual in those days. Story went fine. I came to work the next day to work a desk shift. Saw a nice picture of her, with the story, holding a stick microphone, her hand low on it, the top right under her mouth. Someone (not me!) wrote the caption under it, a quote from the story: "If I blow this, it'll be my own fault." I ran down to the composing room and wrote another cutline immediately. That was back in the lead type era. You could look it up.

 

A few months ago, I saved our crime reporter from making a serious faux pas. There was a local high school assistant coach who was accused of sexual misconduct with a player at the school where he had previously coached.

The player's name was "Stevie," so our reporter assumed it was a gay relationship and was prepared to write it that way for a big Sunday feature on how that coach (and other such accused coaches) are able to move from one school to another without these things popping up during the vetting process.

We were talking about it and he made kind of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge comment about it, so I asked who the player was, and when he said the name, I said, "you know that's a girl, don't you?" I remembered the kid, and it was definitely a she, even with a male first name. He had to frantically re-edit his story before it ran to take out any references to a gay relationship.

 

I think that's a zebra.

 

"Keep Fucking That Chicken" is the greatest goof of all time. Better than "Roasted Nuts."

 

So you know how you run a bunch of generic photos to kill space sometimes and you usually write something like "Such and such stands with such and such to do such and such" in a photo caption?

Yeah. I did that. The problem? The guy who I said was standing was our congressman ... who's in a wheelchair.

My favorite one recently was a coworker of mine who was writing a story on a two-year-old girl who was resuscitated by paramedics. Well, the headline read something akin to "Paramedics recessitate two-year-old."

All I could picture, and I wish I could draw to illustrate this, was a pair of paramedics pushing a two-year-old girl in a swing saying "Quick! We've got to push her harder! Make her say 'Weeee!!!'. Now! We're losing her!"

 

Wow. Just wow.

 

The female anchor's reaction is priceless.

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=ss8LDBNcsWc&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dss8LDBNcsWc

 

One time I was writing a story about a women's basketball team and looking through their schedule to count their bad losses. In their notes, it was displayed in this style:

Jan. 12 at Northwestern L, 67-58.

Well, in looking these up, my eyes followed the wrong line across the page, so I had this team losing, by blowout, to three different teams it actually had blown out. Best part was, I got an e-mail from the SID saying, "We don't need people thinking we're evenworse than we actually are."

 

Once ran a mug for a story about county government ... that wasn't the right guy. Same last name, but the mug I ran was a guy who was in jail for trying to blow up the courthouse.

 

I know I've mentioned this before, but the little tin cups-and-string radio station in my hometown once referred to "Malcolm the Tenth" and "Street Peter's Cathedral" in the same five-minute newscast.

 

This one wasn't mine but rather at the paper I first worked for.

Halloween was cancelled one year because of shitty weather. A lot of people were up in arms over that. The city manager made the decision. His name was Stewart Halloran. On spellcheck, his last name came up "Halloween". The editor in charge of the story about the cancellation of Halloween (allegedly) accidentally hit "Replace All" instead of "Cancel All". The story ran and quoted one Stewart Halloween.

 

Students caught cheating face explosion -- a gem from our student paper. Made Leno.