Headline: Editors Are Human

I admit, this is pretty funny.

Somebody in Pendleton, Oregon, died a little bit over the weekend. It's important to remember that. Don't get me wrong. The newspaper headline about an "amphibious" pitcher is hilarious on at least a couple of levels. But the person that wrote that headline isn't laughing. I should know. I've been that person.

There are a couple of reasons that headline might have happened. For years, small newspapers like the one in Pendleton skewed toward hiring young editors and designers because they work cheap. The problem with young editors is they make young editor mistakes. I should know.

My war story is, thankfully, from college and, also thankfully, isn't that bad. The University of Minnesota men's basketball team played an 8 p.m. Monday night game against Rutgers, which meant I had to dummy in a story. Like a dummy, I wrote actual words in the headline field. I was the sports editor and it was my job to stay late, chuck in the AP story and send the page before our 11:30 deadline. No problem. Done and done.

The next morning, my phone rang. It was one of my reporters, who literally could not talk because he was laughing so hard as he made fun of my headline.

"Schorty, Schorty *snorting noise and other reporters laughing in the background* what exactly did Rutgers do in order to defeat the Gophers?"

The sinking feeling hit me immediately. My dummy headline had run. "Rutgers does something in order to defeat Gophers" made it into all editions. What can I say? It fit perfectly.

Never, ever, write anything on a page that you wouldn't want to see in print. Thank God Rutgers did, in fact, do something to defeat Minnesota. My dummy headlines now consist of 1s and gs, because they are the tallest ascenders and lowest descenders. Also, because you would have to be asleep to miss a headline full of lower-case Gs.

Young editors make mistakes. But so do older editors who have too much work to do. That's the other trend in the newspaper industry. Copy desks have been decimated as newspapers have less money to spend. So they set up regional copy desks. A single copy editor/page designer might be asked to handle 16 pages in a night in two or three different newspapers. The goal, of course, is efficiency. The problem is editors in sports end up chucking pages out the window at the end of the night with nobody looking behind them.

Again, I've been fortunate. I don't work at a newspaper that operates like that. I try to work way, way in advance on my pages because I'm absolutely fearful that I am screwing up the newspaper and that tomorrow, if I'm unlucky, it's my headline that's going to go viral.

By all means, laugh about the amphibious headline. I certainly did. But when you ask, "how did that happen?" just know that it's all too easy.