Post a Meme, any Meme! (no politics)

[jswordy]

 

[jswordy]

 

[jswordy]

 

[jswordy]

View attachment 107709

 

[Rocky]

After reading more of these headlines, and realizing that newspapers actually have "headline writers" whose job is to come up with a headline for a story, I suspect there is more to the job than I originally thought. I would imagine that the objective of the headline writer is to get people to read the story. They, therefore, employ innuendo, double entendre and humor to achieve this. It is either this or it is that they are poor writers.

Still, I find them amusing and hope others do.

Those "dead" are certainly persistent!

Hard to argue this.

Perhaps the schools are closed because there are no students?

Desperate times demand desperate measures.

Yes, actually some 36 years before she died.

 

[winemaker81]

After reading more of these headlines, and realizing that newspapers actually have "headline writers" whose job is to come up with a headline for a story, I suspect there is more to the job than I originally thought. I would imagine that the objective of the headline writer is to get people to read the story. They, therefore, employ innuendo, double entendre and humor to achieve this. It is either this or it is that they are poor writers.

I suspect most of the time it's the latter.

 

[jswordy]

After reading more of these headlines, and realizing that newspapers actually have "headline writers" whose job is to come up with a headline for a story, I suspect there is more to the job than I originally thought. I would imagine that the objective of the headline writer is to get people to read the story. They, therefore, employ innuendo, double entendre and humor to achieve this. It is either this or it is that they are poor writers.

Still, I find them amusing and hope others do.

View attachment 107725 Those "dead" are certainly persistent!

View attachment 107726 Hard to argue this.

View attachment 107727 Perhaps the schools are closed because there are no students?

View attachment 107728 Desperate times demand desperate measures.

View attachment 107729 Yes, actually some 36 years before she died.

(Sorry for the length.)

I did various forms of that pressure-cooker job at a midsize daily for 19 years. To produce pages, newsrooms employed what was called a universal desk, a U-shaped arrangement around which sat various editors. There were copyeditors of the stories, who often would write a suggested headline, and then pass them on to design editors who made up the pages, edited photos and trimmed stories and headlines to fit or directed someone to do that. A news editor and one or more assistant news editors oversaw the flow of the operation and proofed the pages.

The arrangement operated under three constraints: time, space and the urgency of updates to breaking news. The press start time was a set fixture each day, and rarely changed.

In those three was the recipe for potential error – plus this entire process is putting together a 48- or 60- or whatever-page newspaper all at once, so the sheer mass of the flow can cause problems. Hurried headlines written at the last possible moment, a headline being moved and shortened over fresh versions of a breaking story to get it out in the edition as fast as possible (see your Diana headline as an example), or a headline writer trying to shorten up an existing headline to fit – under extreme time pressure – are the main reasons for the erroneous headlines that actually see print. There are many, many more error heads that are caught and never become public. But some inevitably get through, since we are all humans.

The sheer mass of words dealt with in a shift also could induce a kind of numbness, and especially among employees who liked to cruise through their work or were not sufficiently professionally motivated. That means that errors that should be caught slip out into print.

Journalism is a relentless, demanding and unforgiving profession that requires a superhuman talent for accuracy under pressure. Unfortunately, almost no one is superhuman.

My error headline that became famous nationwide: Plenty do do in Huntsville

Obviously, it is supposed to be: Plenty to do in Huntsville. I had the page it was on proofread by an assistant editor, and he did not catch this error in 36-point black type. I never trusted his lackadaisical proofing again. The headline was in a special section that was to run 60,000 copies and then be inserted into the Sunday paper. About 30,000 copies into the press run, the publisher came to my desk and pointed out the error. What a great feeling that was, not. He had to choose to trash 30,000 or just let it go. He chose to save the money and let it go.

Well, the headline somehow made it on "The Tonight Show with David Letterman." While everyone was laughing, I was being relentlessly tarred and feathered for their own amusement by my fellow employees, journalists being a hard and cynical lot. I just kept my head down and kept working, and finally it faded. Then, a decade later, things must have been slow for Dave. It was used again! And I went through the same relentless shellacking I had taken before. It got so bad, I actually wrote a letter to Letterman asking him never to use that headline again.

And that was the thing about working in print. Once it was printed, you could not go back and just edit it so it leaves no trail of ever having been, like you can online. As your examples show, once it is in print it has a very long half-life. So, all those headline writers are still wincing when they see a bad headline they wrote many years ago.

 

[jswordy]

 

[Gilmango]

 

[winemaker81]

 

[Rocky]

(Sorry for the length.)

I did various forms of that pressure-cooker job at a midsize daily for 19 years. To produce pages, newsrooms employed what was called a universal desk, a U-shaped arrangement around which sat various editors. There were copyeditors of the stories, who often would write a suggested headline, and then pass them on to design editors who made up the pages, edited photos and trimmed stories and headlines to fit or directed someone to do that. A news editor and one or more assistant news editors oversaw the flow of the operation and proofed the pages.

The arrangement operated under three constraints: time, space and the urgency of updates to breaking news. The press start time was a set fixture each day, and rarely changed.

In those three was the recipe for potential error – plus this entire process is putting together a 48- or 60- or whatever-page newspaper all at once, so the sheer mass of the flow can cause problems. Hurried headlines written at the last possible moment, a headline being moved and shortened over fresh versions of a breaking story to get it out in the edition as fast as possible (see your Diana headline as an example), or a headline writer trying to shorten up an existing headline to fit – under extreme time pressure – are the main reasons for the erroneous headlines that actually see print. There are many, many more error heads that are caught and never become public. But some inevitably get through, since we are all humans.

The sheer mass of words dealt with in a shift also could induce a kind of numbness, and especially among employees who liked to cruise through their work or were not sufficiently professionally motivated. That means that errors that should be caught slip out into print.

Journalism is a relentless, demanding and unforgiving profession that requires a superhuman talent for accuracy under pressure. Unfortunately, almost no one is superhuman.

My error headline that became famous nationwide: Plenty do do in Huntsville

Obviously, it is supposed to be: Plenty to do in Huntsville. I had the page it was on proofread by an assistant editor, and he did not catch this error in 36-point black type. I never trusted his lackadaisical proofing again. The headline was in a special section that was to run 60,000 copies and then be inserted into the Sunday paper. About 30,000 copies into the press run, the publisher came to my desk and pointed out the error. What a great feeling that was, not. He had to choose to trash 30,000 or just let it go. He chose to save the money and let it go.

Well, the headline somehow made it on "The Tonight Show with David Letterman." While everyone was laughing, I was being relentlessly tarred and feathered for their own amusement by my fellow employees, journalists being a hard and cynical lot. I just kept my head down and kept working, and finally it faded. Then, a decade later, things must have been slow for Dave. It was used again! And I went through the same relentless shellacking I had taken before. It got so bad, I actually wrote a letter to Letterman asking him never to use that headline again.

And that was the thing about working in print. Once it was printed, you could not go back and just edit it so it leaves no trail of ever having been, like you can online. As your examples show, once it is in print it has a very long half-life. So, all those headline writers are still wincing when they see a bad headline they wrote many years ago.

Great post, really enjoyed it!

I have somewhat a background in printing and newspapers and I have many stories that speak to the urgency of output and the lack of information when time is critical. I was Supervisor of Composition and Letterpress in Westinghouse's Printing Division and I understand that "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, there is no getting it back inside."

Two quick stories:

We used to print a calendar that was the 8.5" x 11" type that people hung in their offices or kept on their desks. Every year, the featured theme of the calendar top page changed. I remember we did National Parks, Airmen, Scientists and Inventors, to name a few. When the calendar was opened, the theme story was on top and the month was on the bottom. These calendars were spiral bound and printed on very expensive paper with even more expensive covers. My department was at one end of the shop and I was walking to my boss's office through the Bindery and I picked one of the calendars up to look through it. This was common for Supervisors to do in order to get "more eyes" on the product. Flipping through, I noticed that November had 31 days! I went to the Bindery Supervisor and had him immediately stop work on the calendars. We had about 20,000 printed and about 5,000 bound. We remedied the problem at considerable expense by un-spiraling them, slipping in a newly printed November with 30 days and re-spiraling them. That was less costly than scrapping them. The way this happened was that when printing our calendars, we had seven "months" preprinted, each starting on a day of the week and running for 31 days. If the month was February, we would opaque out the 29, 30 and 31 on the negative. On this November, someone missed deleting the 31.

On another occasion, we really put our foot in it. We had a quarterly job called "Report to Investors" which had a very large run, about 220K copies. It was so large that part of the job would still be on the press while earlier printings were already being shipped. The publication usually had an article be one of the Westinghouse executive along with his or her photograph. It would also include quarterly financial results and expectations for the coming quarter. This happened on the night (4-12) shift, which was not uncommon because the supervisor had limited resources available to him should he have a question. He was ready to go to press but he did not have a name for under the executive's picture. Frantically, he called people but could get no help. Trying to solve it himself, he found the original copy and artwork for the job and the executive's picture, underneath which was the name, "Fabian Bachrach." Thinking this was the name, he had the name typeset and stripped into the negative, made the printing plate and started the job. Early printings went to the bindery for cutting, folding and shipping and it was not until the next afternoon it was discovered that Fabian Bachrach was the photographer. I don't recall the name of the executive but it was something like J. Worthington Manville, or something like that. Wow, was there hell to pay for that one because all the other execs at HQ started calling him Fabian.

 

[jswordy]

 

[jswordy]

Great post, really enjoyed it!

I have somewhat a background in printing and newspapers and I have many stories that speak to the urgency of output and the lack of information when time is critical. I was Supervisor of Composition and Letterpress in Westinghouse's Printing Division and I understand that "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, there is no getting it back inside."

Two quick stories:

We used to print a calendar that was the 8.5" x 11" type that people hung in their offices or kept on their desks. Every year, the featured theme of the calendar top page changed. I remember we did National Parks, Airmen, Scientists and Inventors, to name a few. When the calendar was opened, the theme story was on top and the month was on the bottom. These calendars were spiral bound and printed on very expensive paper with even more expensive covers. My department was at one end of the shop and I was walking to my boss's office through the Bindery and I picked one of the calendars up to look through it. This was common for Supervisors to do in order to get "more eyes" on the product. Flipping through, I noticed that November had 31 days! I went to the Bindery Supervisor and had him immediately stop work on the calendars. We had about 20,000 printed and about 5,000 bound. We remedied the problem at considerable expense by un-spiraling them, slipping in a newly printed November with 30 days and re-spiraling them. That was less costly than scrapping them. The way this happened was that when printing our calendars, we had seven "months" preprinted, each starting on a day of the week and running for 31 days. If the month was February, we would opaque out the 29, 30 and 31 on the negative. On this November, someone missed deleting the 31.

On another occasion, we really put our foot in it. We had a quarterly job called "Report to Investors" which had a very large run, about 220K copies. It was so large that part of the job would still be on the press while earlier printings were already being shipped. The publication usually had an article be one of the Westinghouse executive along with his or her photograph. It would also include quarterly financial results and expectations for the coming quarter. This happened on the night (4-12) shift, which was not uncommon because the supervisor had limited resources available to him should he have a question. He was ready to go to press but he did not have a name for under the executive's picture. Frantically, he called people but could get no help. Trying to solve it himself, he found the original copy and artwork for the job and the executive's picture, underneath which was the name, "Fabian Bachrach." Thinking this was the name, he had the name typeset and stripped into the negative, made the printing plate and started the job. Early printings went to the bindery for cutting, folding and shipping and it was not until the next afternoon it was discovered that Fabian Bachrach was the photographer. I don't recall the name of the executive but it was something like J. Worthington Manville, or something like that. Wow, was there hell to pay for that one because all the other execs at HQ started calling him Fabian.

Great stories! I'm sure you've heard my favorite one, about the time "Newsweek" ran an ad with a full-sized dollar bill in it. The magazine was printed in several locations nationwide, and the East Coast plant had started up and had about 100,000 copies done when a pressman on break saw that dollar bill and wondered. He cut it out and put it in a change machine in the break room and got 4 quarters. Then all hell broke loose. Stop the presses! Call everyone down the line, all the way to the West Coast, to tell them not to start printing. Trash 100,000 copies. Get the ad designers to shrink the dollar bill. Ship out the new layout via FedEX (no Internet yet) to the downstream plants. Restart the presses.

While the new editions were running, that same pressman started wondering again. He took a plain piece of paper and, using a dollar from his pocket, cut it out to the same size. Inserted the paper into the change machine, got 4 quarters. The machine was broken.

Indeed, words are not the only things that can cause wholesale chugging of a bottle of Maalox. When the press started, the news editor at the paper I worked for would get the first few discard copies, just to make sure all was well. The press would continue to run unless there was a problem.

At midnight one Saturday, just after the Sunday edition press start, News Editor Joe Duncan got his copies, took one look at the top of the front page, said, "Oh my God!" and grabbed the phone to yell, "Stop the press!" It was the only time I ever heard that done in my career, since those were some of the most costly words in newspapers. Here is what he saw...



It became known as "the BJ Edition," and only a few copies survived. The female in the photo was a reporter who was in the audience covering this guy's speech. A zoom lens foreshortened the perspective, then a designer dropped the background on the pic to make it even more, um, not good.

 

[jswordy]

 

[jswordy]

Full disclosure: I used to own that exact Tag-Along trailer.

 

[jswordy]

 

[ibglowin]

Who is serving some of this today? LOL

 

[jswordy]

 

[sour_grapes]

View attachment 107746

Isn't that the truth!? I know they are just doing what the program tells them to do, but that drives me nuts. I have an Impreza station wagon/hatchback. If you cut it in half at the B-pillar, you couldn't distinguish it from the sedan. If I order an airfilter, you don't need to know about the back of the car!

 

[jswordy]