Secrets of the City

That subhead should leave a bad “Tastes” in the copy editor’s mouth, Max.

Saw another on in last Sunday’s Strib. Headine on story about veterans’ widows not getting benefits was misspelled “Veteran’s windows…”

Strib FAIL.

Here is a comment right in here and more in here. Here is more comment right in here and here.

This has happened numerous times elsewhere, too, including the New York Times. It’s what happens when newspapers start cutting staff at the editor level and editing is left in the hands of yung journelists who cant even spel there own names nowadays.

Brauer has it, too.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Heh! That’s Greeking to me, kurtis.

It’s interesting that it happened in the Taste section. Generally, those pages are written, edited, paginated and printed well ahead of time. I think Taste usually runs mid-afternoon the day before it’s delivered. So it’s not like a west coast Twins game where the newsroom is writing and editing on the fly as the presses are running.

Hell, the article is picked up from the Los Angeles Daily News. I wonder what sub-head they used?

Everybody makes mistakes at work. But when you work at a newspaper, your mistakes are distributed to thousands of people every day.

Lileks tweeted that it was a complicated and boring computer glitch, rather than a human error situation.

I hate seeing what is happening at the Strib, but I have to agree with Brauer that mistakes like these happen regardless of staff size.

It might be happening more frequently now though.

A some point, some human turned the job over to a machine, Jason.

There’s the human error factor.

We can blame it all on the invention of movable type, I suppose.

I used to write my own headings, print them on an old Linotronic, run it through a waxer, and (literally) cut and paste onto a carboard backer before going to press.

And yes, I screwed up more than once. Unfortunately, I could not blame computer glitches back in those days.

Damn you, Johannes Gutenberg!

I call B.S. on Lileks’ Tweet: It’s someone’s job to catch those errors. Either in the newsroom or at the printing plant.

or in New Deli?

I’m sorry if that last comment sounded insensative, miller. Not meant to be personal.

To show that I am a total idiot, I misspelled “insensitive.”

(leaving now in shame)

At least ‘insensative’ wasn’t printed up several thousand times. And once we get an edit feature back, you can pretend like mistakes never happen.

Hey! I was one of the employees whose job was outsourced to India. But don’t worry about it. The whole thing worked out pretty well for me.

Ah…you misspelled Delhi also.

Unless his job is being done by someone at Bros Deli inbetween making up sandwiches.

THis happens a lot with them.

I like that subhead; it`s got rhythm.

Are there any recent Strib employees hanging around here? I was wondering if that computer system from the Bronze age known as Atex is still being used there. If Atex is still around, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often.

StarTribune stopped using Atex a while ago.

When I saw the Taste section, my first thought was that they had been most concerned with making sure the color of the subhed matched the dominant color of the photo — and it did quite nicely. A very pleasant caramel.

After that it just got forgotten. Maybe they can hire a few proofers with KK’s salary.

I can confirm that this mistake was actually caused by a strange technical glitch, the mundane details of which would bore you. The cutting of staff, while disturbing and undoubtedly harmful in the long term, didn’t have anything to do with this one. The glitch allowed a proofed page with the correct subhed to be reviewed while the computer file reverted to the old, dummy hed. Although I can’t explain why it wasn’t caught at the printing plant; perhaps they were too busy fretting about how the company wants to lay half of them off and slash the wages of those lucky enough to stick around.