Police Log: "Misdemeanors: blahblahblhablahb"
April 9, 2023 11:56 AM Subscribe
Back in the day when copy editors couldn't correct mistakes after a newspaper had already been printed on paper and distributed house-to-house physically—but also after the advent of Web2.0—comes badnewspaper.com: an extinct volcano of these ossified mistakes, captured by digital cameras and posted on blogs for fogies like myself who used to buy trade paperbacks containing this sort of bathroom-reading-content (at least before Jay Leno cornered that lucrative market). Here is a typical entry.
The WDIV (Detroit) website recently:
"The first sign of syphillis can be a painless, round, and firm sore on the gentiles..."
posted by NorthernLite at 12:55 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
"The first sign of syphillis can be a painless, round, and firm sore on the gentiles..."
posted by NorthernLite at 12:55 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Reminds me of my favorite press release from college radio days, first line no less: “The 14 songs that compromise Kingmaker’s new album…”
posted by saintjoe at 1:12 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by saintjoe at 1:12 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
The pre-Leno books I remember (and still own, somehow) were Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim and its sequel, Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge, from the Columbia Journalism Review. It looks like CJR carried on this tradition in a blog from 2015-2019.
posted by staggernation at 1:18 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by staggernation at 1:18 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
This one looks straight out of Liartown’s Apple Cabin Foods.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:07 PM on April 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:07 PM on April 9, 2023 [6 favorites]
When I was a kid our hometown paper (which locals called The Mullet Wrapper because its main value was for transporting fish) had a big, extremely self-congratulatory 100th anniversary issue. One of the main headlines from that day read "CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF PUBIC SERVICE." It was all anybody could talk about for days.
posted by saladin at 3:17 PM on April 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by saladin at 3:17 PM on April 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
Sounds like it wasn't just mullets getting wrapped in it...
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:24 PM on April 9, 2023
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:24 PM on April 9, 2023
I found a follow-up to the piece on Leonso Canales. Apparently his campaign to replace the greeting “hello” with ‘heaven-o” never really caught on. Perhaps he should have suggested going back to ”ahoy-hoy”.
posted by TedW at 5:52 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by TedW at 5:52 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
> I found a follow-up to the piece on Leonso Canales.
Apparently!
posted by not_on_display at 7:10 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Apparently!
"'Hell came right in my face in ’88,' he said, according to a 1997 Austin American-Statesman column by John Kelso. (Really, it had come out of his face.)"PAGING THE COPY EDITOR
posted by not_on_display at 7:10 PM on April 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'm on record here saying journalists are often terrible at basic math, but this one isn't likely the newspaper's fault. At blogs featuring strange record covers, I've seen several quintets that were actually sextets, quartets that were trios, and so on. Just because the number in the group changed didn't mean the name did.
posted by bryon at 8:09 PM on April 9, 2023
posted by bryon at 8:09 PM on April 9, 2023
Like many journalists who've worked in print media, I'm very fond of newspaper corrections. There's one particular example which I've had memorised for about 40 years now, and it goes like this:
"Instead of being arrested yesterday as we stated for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Reverend James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago."
This clipping has very frequently appeared in the UK press throughout my lifetime, usually quoted by a columnist looking for an amusing bit of copy and to offer a wry acknowledgement that he and his colleagues are far from perfect. Until last night, though, when this thread prompted me to dig into its origins a bit more deeply, I'd never been able to find any piece which gave its source.
One clipping, I knew, had vaguely sourced it to "a Kansas newspaper", but that's hardly definitive. Most journalists quoting it didn't bother to source it at all, presumably because they simply didn't know. That's often a red flag indicating that a piece of information has no foundation in fact whatsoever, but is just a shaggy dog story the journalist once heard and couldn't resist using. I really didn't want that to be the case here, as it would have fatally undermined the clipping's appeal, but I was feeling brave last night, so I decided to have another little dig around anyway.
I plugged the Wellman correction into Newspapers.com's search engine and asked it to show me the oldest entry first. I'd been hoping the original correction itself might pop up, but in fact the chronological list was topped by a November 1933 Liverpool Post story which quoted the correction for laughs just like everyone else. Reviewing Frances Horner's then-new memoir Time Remembered, the LP man reproduces Horner's anecdote about first learning of the correction from the painter Edward Burne-Jones. It was, the LP piece, adds "an editorial correction in the 'Schuzler Predicator'."
That's a paper I've been able to discover nothing about, though Burne-Jones' dates (1833-1898) mean we can deduce that Wellman must have died by 1894 at the very latest. The correction he prompted has been in more or less constant circulation ever since, giving it an impressive afterlife of well over a century. You can see the LP story for yourself in my short Twitter thread here.
Couple of other thoughts on the subject:
In the days of print, the subs responsible for laying out a page often wouldn't even have seen the story's pic when writing its headline or caption. Either it hadn't arrived in the office yet, or he'd have to work from a very poor-quality fax which reduced the pic to a couple of solid black blobs. Could be four people, could be six, could be a dozen: all he could do is go by the group's name.
The reason many newspaper corrections are so funny lies in the paper's determination to avoid reminding readers of its original error. This often leads to such convoluted or evasive wording that the correction winds up looking more embarrassing than ever. The Guardian's hit on a good solution here, burying all such pars in its exquisitely dull Corrections & Clarifications column. Most of the material here is so inconsequential and boring that readers quickly learn to skip the column altogether. More embarrassing corrections can be safely placed there too, where the paper knows they'll almost certainly be ignored. Genius!
Another favourite clipping of mine - a misprint this time rather than a correction - appears in one of Private Eye's Cutting Humour collections. Placing a death notice in the classified columns of their local paper, a grieving family meant to conclude it with the words "Sadly missed". Unfortunately, the paper cocked this up, rendering it as "Sadly pissed" instead.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:32 AM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
"Instead of being arrested yesterday as we stated for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Reverend James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago."
This clipping has very frequently appeared in the UK press throughout my lifetime, usually quoted by a columnist looking for an amusing bit of copy and to offer a wry acknowledgement that he and his colleagues are far from perfect. Until last night, though, when this thread prompted me to dig into its origins a bit more deeply, I'd never been able to find any piece which gave its source.
One clipping, I knew, had vaguely sourced it to "a Kansas newspaper", but that's hardly definitive. Most journalists quoting it didn't bother to source it at all, presumably because they simply didn't know. That's often a red flag indicating that a piece of information has no foundation in fact whatsoever, but is just a shaggy dog story the journalist once heard and couldn't resist using. I really didn't want that to be the case here, as it would have fatally undermined the clipping's appeal, but I was feeling brave last night, so I decided to have another little dig around anyway.
I plugged the Wellman correction into Newspapers.com's search engine and asked it to show me the oldest entry first. I'd been hoping the original correction itself might pop up, but in fact the chronological list was topped by a November 1933 Liverpool Post story which quoted the correction for laughs just like everyone else. Reviewing Frances Horner's then-new memoir Time Remembered, the LP man reproduces Horner's anecdote about first learning of the correction from the painter Edward Burne-Jones. It was, the LP piece, adds "an editorial correction in the 'Schuzler Predicator'."
That's a paper I've been able to discover nothing about, though Burne-Jones' dates (1833-1898) mean we can deduce that Wellman must have died by 1894 at the very latest. The correction he prompted has been in more or less constant circulation ever since, giving it an impressive afterlife of well over a century. You can see the LP story for yourself in my short Twitter thread here.
Couple of other thoughts on the subject:
In the days of print, the subs responsible for laying out a page often wouldn't even have seen the story's pic when writing its headline or caption. Either it hadn't arrived in the office yet, or he'd have to work from a very poor-quality fax which reduced the pic to a couple of solid black blobs. Could be four people, could be six, could be a dozen: all he could do is go by the group's name.
The reason many newspaper corrections are so funny lies in the paper's determination to avoid reminding readers of its original error. This often leads to such convoluted or evasive wording that the correction winds up looking more embarrassing than ever. The Guardian's hit on a good solution here, burying all such pars in its exquisitely dull Corrections & Clarifications column. Most of the material here is so inconsequential and boring that readers quickly learn to skip the column altogether. More embarrassing corrections can be safely placed there too, where the paper knows they'll almost certainly be ignored. Genius!
Another favourite clipping of mine - a misprint this time rather than a correction - appears in one of Private Eye's Cutting Humour collections. Placing a death notice in the classified columns of their local paper, a grieving family meant to conclude it with the words "Sadly missed". Unfortunately, the paper cocked this up, rendering it as "Sadly pissed" instead.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:32 AM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Jeff Bagwell leads MLB in almost every category. From a 2005 edition of the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
posted by stltony at 8:26 AM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by stltony at 8:26 AM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
The original Wordpress site, when it was inexplicably known as Criggo, is still up.
posted by plastic_animals at 10:09 AM on April 10, 2023
posted by plastic_animals at 10:09 AM on April 10, 2023
My former paper once swept a bunch of awards at a statewide journalism competition. They ran the usual humblebrag story about it the next day. The headline began just like this:
Excellance in Journalism
posted by martin q blank at 11:23 AM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Excellance in Journalism
posted by martin q blank at 11:23 AM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
That's the gods of newsprint punishing the paper for blowing its own trumpet.
If ever you write a piece making fun of another journalist's typo, you can guarantee they'll sabotage that too. As evidence of this, I offer the correction I had to add above.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:24 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
If ever you write a piece making fun of another journalist's typo, you can guarantee they'll sabotage that too. As evidence of this, I offer the correction I had to add above.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:24 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Off!" as "incest repellent" just seemed too on point.
posted by dlugoczaj at 9:02 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by dlugoczaj at 9:02 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
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"After several incidents when rangers were nearly attacked while opening culvert traps to release captured bears, the door on the trap will now be opened using electric wenches."
posted by ITravelMontana at 12:33 PM on April 9, 2023 [8 favorites]