I was one of the editors for our school newspaper when I was in college and very high levels of professionalism were expected of us by the newspaper staff as well as the professors that were charged with making sure it functioned. Becoming an actual editor is an extremely difficult field to get involved in, particularly now that newspaper sales are on the decline.
This is why it is so remarkable to me that these mistakes ever see the light of day.
It says the author works for the Washington Post but to be fair to Sally Squires she may not have been responsible for the headline as this may have been picked up by a local paper elsewhere. Even if if is from a time period before spell checker existed, the irony of the title is pretty hilarious as well as shameful.
I think the brain of the author and the editor of this article is still evolving. A spell-checker still would have picked this up unless brian was capitalized. Unacceptable that this would happen in a high-school paper, let alone a professional one.
If you have ever used a design program such as Illustrator you are likely familiar with placeholders that simply show the sizes so that you can decide which format to use. The fact that this made it all the way to print is just a terrible embarrassment for the staff.
There is nothing grammatically wrong with this one, but it is pretty insensitive if it was done on purpose.
All of these mistakes would have resulted in at least a bad grade for us at our newspaper that only had a circulation of a couple thousand copies. The last one would have probably seen the editor removed from their position even though we weren't being paid anyway.
While these sorts of thing are a rarity, there are thousands of them over the years and some of them are extremely bad. It has become a bit of a hobby of mine to collect these as I find them quite humorous as well as disappointing that I was so frustrated by the lack of work in this field that I quickly gave up on my search seeking employment in it and in the meantime there are some gainfully-employed editors out there, getting paid a decent salary, that don't really seem to take the job seriously.