Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Run Teen Run

I had to laugh at this combination of newspaper headlines. If you can't read it in the photo, the main story, Pride & Joy, about a local girl who qualified for the Marshall Islands Olympic team, has the subheadline In less than a month, a Marysville teen will run the race of her life as an Olympian for the Marshall Islands. Right next to it is an article about a boy criminal, still on the loose, who has been breaking into vacation homes. The headline there is Teen can't run forever, police say.

The combination of the two headlines sounds like a threat.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, wow. That's a spectacular one, and something we journalism teachers show the kids as an example of what not to do. (And, yet, we still slip up and do it when there's a deadline!)

To this day, my favorite section of the Columbia Journalism Review is "The Lower Case," a page in which editing goofs and ill-advised bits of layout (like that one) are put on display. It's meant as a learning tool, but some of them are real knee-slappers (again, like that one!).

Rainmaker said...

Nice, looks like you were up in my old stomping grounds near KPAE. Funny, I'm just on a flight back to DC from Seattle...

Anonymous said...

This topic lead me on an interesting (at least to me, YMMV) tangent. When I was in high school the local newspaper printed a headline gaffe that got slickers on a national scale. At the time there was a proposed dam project named the Dickey-Lincoln dam. Jimmy Carter, then the US president, had shifted the decision to proceed with the project to the then governor of Maine, Joseph Brennan. The Bangor Daily News announced this with the headline "Carter places Dickey in Brennans Hands" with much hilarity ensuing. A number of Google searches failed to come up with the correct quote, but I was surprised to find the there were literally dozens of websites (more than 42) which claimed that the headline was "Clinton places Dickey in Gore's hands" Never mind that in 1978 Neither Clinton nor Gore had much of a role in wither national or Maine state politics. I could only find one website that had the actual headline, and Ironically, it wasn't a collection of Headline bloopers, but a page maintained by the US army Corps of Engineers of newspaper articles about dam projects.

Every one of the incorrect accounts also has lists the same, incorrect name for the newspaper, which suggests a single source.

Interesting how on the internet, someone fabricates some incorrect "facts", everyone cuts and pastes and pretty soon it becomes "true" because it's all over the internet.