Bad headlines by major news outlets

I had an unpaid internship when I was in college. I was hoping that this would lead to me being on the editorial board of some sort of publication in print when I graduated. This was before the internet became everything and basically all print media went out of business. In that regard I am thankful that I found out that the jobs in journalism are almost exclusively nepotism-driven in that it is who you know, not how good you are at the job that gets you hired.

This is true in all professions but it did make me really upset at the time. Looking back I am very happy that I did not get one of these then highly sought-after jobs because these days almost none of them exist anymore.

Your job as an editor is a lot easier these days because of all the various program that exist to help but there was a time, even going just a decade or so about with programs like Illustrator, where the spelling and grammar, was completely left up to the user. Back in the days of traditional print, almost all of this had to be done with your eyes. Mistakes have been made and some of them are pretty damn funny.

I would imagine that Roberts was less-than-thrilled about this mistake and the paper issued a correction and apology. Had the word "holes" appeared in the body of the article it would almost be excusable but in the headline? On the front page? Someone was asleep at the wheel. Also it doesn't make any sense that every word of the headline is capitalized. That is not a standard in any way.

src

This one is funny on a personal level because this is one of the newspapers I applied for a job with and was denied so much as an interview. There is nothing grammatically wrong with what they have written here, it's just stupid and a very poor choice of words.

src

This is in relation to the real-estate crash of the 90's that resulted in the crazy boom in housing combined with horrible banking programs resulting in a massive crash of the real-estate industry and therefore a "slowdown" in the construction industry. However, there are many ways this could have been worded better as you should never refer to something slowing down faster. It's just something a toddler would say and this person has no place in journalism.

src

I didn't read this article, I just stumbled upon it. I would imagine that they are referring to witnesses to homicide or perhaps relatives of gang violence being reluctant to talk to the police. They certainly don't mean that dead people don't talk to the police after they have been killed, but that is exactly what the headline infers.

There are thousands of other examples. They happen just as frequently today as they did back when everything was in print but they get quick edits once they are discovered. I would imagine that it probably happens more frequently these days because thousands of articles are written every day and since everyone knows they can edit later, they don't need to put as much care into the original editing.

Back in the day though, making a mistake like this meant that tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of copies were already out the door by the time it was discovered.

I was bitter at the time when I couldn't find a job in journalism because all of these people did. During my 6 months and an unpaid editor I never made any mistakes and likely would have been severely reprimanded if I had. These folks, probably kept their jobs. Oh well, at least we can laugh at their expense.