Somebody just lost his job I think.

That’s just awesome. Wow.

Yet another glaring example of why we fight an increasingly uphill battle with design students to learn meticulous proofreading habits early and stick to them. I need to nab a photo of this example, but it immediately reminds me of a sign my wife and I saw just this week while we were driving around in Lincoln. There’s a quick-printing and sign manufacturer just shy of downtown with what appears to be about a 1-2 year old cast-plastic back-lit sign that reads “So-and-So Printing and Sign Comany.”

A sure sign that they’ll be getting my business at no point within this century…

I find it particularly ironic that e-mail and blogs have enabled and encouraged a mass population to write more frequently than they may ever have before, but have also seemed to excelerate the disintegration of spelling, grammar and proofreading. Everytime I think about it / write about it I hear a codgery voice somewhere in my head saying “These darn kids just can’t read and write anymore!”

That voice is quickly stopped in its tracks everytime I see an adult example of the same behavior. The ever-increasing exceleration of what “instant” writing / printing / design / etc. means is slipping well past what humans are at least currently able to keep up with. Bleakly, I doubt we’ll see fewer examples of this sort of slip-up anytime in the near future.

I think you meant “acceleration” and “accelerate,” not “exceleration” and “excelerate.” That irony is too delicious not to mention.

It’s easy — and often accurate — to blame a proofing failure for this type of mistake. But it’s also possible for a computer glitch to result in the wrong version of a page being printed. A mistake is a mistake, but producing a newspaper is a complicated process. The mistakes can creep in a thousand different ways. A proofreader or copy editor — I swear I’m not one — may or may not be to blame.

No way this is human error as in “somebody on the copy desk looked at the page, didn’t notice the hed/cutline, and signed it off.” It’s got to be human error as in “somebody on the copy desk did a wrong computer thing that sent an earlier version of the page to the press, and nobody noticed it before part of the run had gone to the loading dock.” I’ll bet the copydesker whose job used to involve standing beside the press to check the first papers now has to do something else instead, if that job even exists.

I’m reminded of a photographer who wrote a dummy caption that accompanied a snow photo in an Illinois newspaper a couple of decades ago. He wrote about “a whole shitload of snow” that hit the local community, no doubt thinking it would be changed. Of course, it got in the paper.

A lesson in free publicity.

Make a huge mistake like this one.

There’s an explanation of the whole thing here.

I find it somewhat ironic that everyone is piling on for this mistake considering that blogs and internet newsites have mistakes on just about EVERY PAGE.

The spelling and grammar on the internet is TERRIBLE. If anything, the blogs and internet news folks ought to be pointing the finger at THEMSELVES.

The paper was trying to make a tight deadline and made a mistake. That’s probably the biggest mistake the paper has made in YEARS. Cut them some slack, and be more worried about possible errors in the FACTS of the paper instead.

Usedtoworkthere,

You refute the idea that this is one of the Omaha World Herald’s biggest mistakes in years.

So, that means you think they make this kind of mistake all the time?

My point was that with incredibly tight deadlines and with publishing a paper every night (Actually, printing sections almost continuously 24/7), that it is amazing that the paper doesn’t make this kind of mistake all the time - but they don’t. It is pretty rare for a paper to be distributed with a missing headline.

However, you say this wasn’t a problem of proofing, and then you go on to say that the Omaha World Herald doesn’t have time for proofing! If they are not proofing, then isn’t that the problem? Don’t you think if they HAD proofed the section, they would have caught the problem?

I agree do agree with you that everyone is making too big of a deal out of this. It’s pretty obvious what happened, I’m sure that it didn’t hurt any of the readers, and furthermore, other media outlets make mistakes that are worse than this all the time.

ChrisM70, the point I was trying to make was that the guys at The WH are seriously undermanned and, at times, overwhelmed …and they are saddled with a protocol and a technology that takes control out of the hands of their most experienced guys. To argue, with credulity, that proofing would have averted the mistake is a sublime example of wrong-headed thinking, to say the least. This is not a suburban office where you can leisurely loll words around in your mouth. …I am certain that those guys now have some punitive, onerous layer added to their jobs and — I got news for you — they still won’t be proofing anything.

I am not saying this wasn’t an embarrassing error, or even a preventable one. (To wit, it’s common in The WH to find mistakes in later editions that were fixed in an earlier one, and whoever was in charge in Sports that night should have made sure that the fix they made for the Iowa edition survived for the last two.) I mean, say what you want. It’s certainly a valid topic for a blog, or for joking around, or whatever, though what it has to do with design is beyond me. What I am saying is that it’s easy to find a mistake and put it on your blog or write your letter, but you try to do their job, with who they have to help them, with what they get paid and with what they put up with, and see if you can do better.

PS. Newspapers aren’t what they used to be. The line that separated sweatshop from career milestone is creeping up the circulation ladder. Stop expecting these guys to be grammarians, artists, businessmen and frigging Henry Ward Beecher all wrapped up in one. A daily newspaper gives you a lot of ways to make a mistake. Taking too much pleasure from finding one is inelegant. It is, to quote an imaginary person, “the punch Ali never gave Foreman when he was going down.”

You said, they don’t proof anything…who doesn’t proof? The copy desk? The composers? The pressman? The delivery drivers?

Despite your assertion, SOMEONE at that paper has to be proofing the paper.

Where I’m from (yes I work for a newspaper), our newspaper actually does proof the paper, and they do press checks and constantly check color, spelling, and accuracy. Sure, mistakes happen, but you PROOF the paper trying to keep the errors to a minimum (especially with the advertisements).

I would wager that if a paper didn’t have time to check for accuracy, then the readers probably don’t have time for the newspaper’s nonsense.

As my own spelling / word error above pointed out, and as illustrated by Used above:

“I am certain the pages pictured above were sent without anyone ever seeing them, as a proof or on a computer screen. It was just click and send. By virtue of their zoning practices, The WH sends dozens of pages that way every night.”

• the true culprit in these matters may have very, very little to do with the human capacity to proof things and a great, great deal to do with how quickly technology enables us to send things to final print but how, in comparison, slowly our own brains are at recognizing all of the mistakes that might be heading down the pike simply at the click of a key or mouse button.

Case in point, I thought and wrote at the same speed that I typed, trusted my own training and eye in picking out spelling errors and clicked “Post” without even a second thought about rereading what I’d written.

Negligence on my part in taking the extra time to reread and also technology that wasn’t equipped to point out my error as I made it, but allowed me to “go to press” without any extra flight-checks to stop me from making a public ass of myself. Nate, in fact, has even been kind enough to tell me in the past few months about how he’s worked on improving his spelling and grammar accuracy when he posts:

• Typing the post in an e-mail program or Word or any other piece of software with spell-checking already built into its functioning, then pasting that corrected copy into the text area on this page.

Having heard it, would you think I’d have taken the time to adopt that practice?

Not until today, while the memory of my own gaffe was still strong enough to remind me to take the extra time and check things over before they actually hit the skids. A palpable reminder that my own medicine still leaves an even more bitter taste in my mouth than any other…

I guess I’ll also take this chance to comment back on Tony’s note from above:

“I don’t mind Blogs and other internet web sites having some grammar issues. They can be edited on the fly, and will be gone in time.”

This leaves a major question in my mind related to this technology: will all of this writing actually be gone in the future, or (more importantly), will it be available only on machines and in storage that is so antiquated that people will have no way of accessing it?

In discussions about the curious shortsightedness that people have developed about computer storage I’ve regularly highlighted the example of newspapers as a classic example of a “storage device” that has outlived most expectations of its longevity. A lot of the microfilm and microfiche that newspapers were documented onto in the 1960s and 1970s is actually deteriorating and turning to plastic goo much more quickly than the paper copies of the same information.

It seems that the actual newspapers will more than outlive their proposed replacements, but I wonder how many libraries are choosing to maintain and house those newspapers and how many are simply saying “That’s what electronic storage is for now.”

Why don’t blogs and instant messaging software have grammar check and spell check?

Word has it. Outlook has it. Why not AIM or blogger?