Things that should have never made it to print

I was an editor for a newspaper when I was in college. It was an unpaid position but I took it very seriously because I really wanted to pursue a career in journalism. I ended up not doing so because as it turns out most of these jobs are driven by nepotism, even at a lower level. Basically it is all who you know, not what you know, and i think this lack of actual ability and / or care on the part of the reporters and editors actually makes it to the hands of the consumer from time to time.

Here are some painful, yet humorous examples.

When this was eventually pointed out to the sports editor and the person who authored this pieces I bet they hung their heads in shame. A misspelled word every now and then is expected (well, it shouldn't happen given the technology that we have today but "shits" actually does work in this sentence as far as spelling and grammar checks would be concerned) but when the misspelled word actually ends up being a banned and profane word that can actually result in fines, it's considered a "no no."

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_{did that 1 in 4 write this article?}

This is a minor publication and given the subject matter, it is even more funny that someone accidentally saying "shits" in their sentence. It is technically not spelled wrong nor is it grammatically incorrect and therefore the electronic resources would not catch it. However, especially since it is a headline it really should have jumped out at the staff there.

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This one is less forgivable since "postoned" is not a word and would be caught by any spell checker. It could be a case of the software that they use not having spell check (which is hard to imagine) but years ago I was using Adobe Illustrator to make some publications for a friend and realized that their text editor had no spelling or grammar check in the default settings, so I suppose it is possible.

Either way the irony of a misspelling in an article about a spelling bee is not lost on me.

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There are a lot of these out there and while this one is pretty funny, there are others that have massive websites the likes of which a person would never copy down. I think that most publications these days don't even bother with a print edition anymore but there was a time when the web side of things were relatively minor and the major focus was on the print side of things. Oh how times have changed.

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These are pretty mild examples of mistakes in papers and they are actually my favorite kind. I say that because the errors that we see today aren't actually errors at all, they are tactics. The media outlet will publish something they know to be untrue and then 3 days later issue a retraction on the part of their website that nobody ever reads... at that point the sensationalized news which was false has already spread through social media. Then it becomes the job of another news network on the opposite side of the political fence to point out the "mistake" of the other media outlet on their own sites.

So I say, give me some spelling and grammar errors. At least those are innocent even though they are still pretty....