Bad headlines in papers

When I was in university I took on the unpaid position of being and editor for a relatively low-circulation newspaper. We only had about 35,000 issues per week and only 2 editions per week so suffice to say my job was a bit easier than someone who runs a daily paper, but they are also paid. I took this job in the hopes that it would lead to a career in journalism but years later I would find out that those positions, at least the ones worth having anyway, were driven almost entirely by nepotism (who you know, not what you know) and I think that this is pretty evident when you look at the wide array of poorly thought out or even incorrectly spelled headlines that exist out there.

As it would turn out it is probably a good thing that I didn't end up in this career because while no one saw it coming at the time time, that industry is basically dead or dying, no matter where you look in the world. So perhaps fortune was shining upon me when I was denied job after job, despite being qualified for it.

Here is a look at some headlines that the unpaid editor (me) at at twice a week paper would have caught but whoever was in charge of these publications did not.

I am sure that you can get what it is that they are trying to say here. They are trying to say that Diana was not killed at the scene of the accident but rather, managed to survive for some time after and then died in the hospital. There are dozens of ways in which they could have worded this so that it wouldn't be so stupid.

This one is particularly egregious because it comes from the Associated Press, which is and has been one of the largest purveyors of journalism in the world for my entire life. They have a massive team of editors and not one person, or the technology that they are using happened to notice that Mississippi is missing 3 letters in their headline? Ouch.

There isn't anything misspelled nor are the headlines stupid but another aspect of being an editor, even at a low level like I was in my 20's, is layout and making certain that captions, photos, and previews for articles featured later in the paper are in a spot that doesn't seem ridiculous. Someone should have caught this. It's funnier the way it is so I'm kind of happy they didn't.

There isn't anything wrong with the wording here but I wanted to speak about this because it is another form of "dumb" and not related to the news. Why on earth would any government or justice department bother with continuing to convict someone who already has a 2,000 year sentence? Government is silly sometimes.

Maybe they were trying to do a play on words instead of saying "It's cruel but true" and that would have been ok, but still dumb. However, the grammatical mistake that follows is really terrible. This would be fine if it was some little kid's school assignment and merely a typo but this appears to be a major newspaper and that sort of mistake is something that would at least get me reprimanded if not re-assigned.

That's it for now.

I don't know if you appreciate this sort of thing as much as I do and also we find them a lot less frequently in digital stories because while they still do happen, they are easily corrected before most people even know it happened. Back in the day that wasn't possible in print and most of the papers probably just hoped that most people didn't notice.