I went to school initially for journalism. I wouldn't say that anything I learned there was particularly useful and almost none of it applies to today's media world but there was one thing that my professors were adamant about and that was that we get the headline correct. Actually, we were probably held to a much highers standard as dopey don't-really-understand-why-we-are-studying-this students than a majority of the print media is today.
These headlines are funny to me because they all would have been rejected by the teachers I had during my 1.5 years as a journalism major. However, I think that some of them may have been done intentionally just to get a rise out of people.
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I'm not going to break this down like everyone is stupid. You can see the obvious problem with this headline. This was published long before someone could go "viral" for something like this as the internet barely existed in the early 90's.
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I haven't seen how any of these programs function these days or if they even exist. They have likely been replaced by Wordpress or something similar but back in the days of actual print media, layouts of papers were determined by something called "Placeholders" where there would be nonsensical script that was kind of popularized by "lorem ipsum" typesetting that isn't meant to make it to print but rather, to give an outline of what the final product will look like from a graphical design standpoint. The fact that this placeholder was obviously altered, then somehow made it past editors and spell-checkers is truly a wonderful act of neglect. I was in charge of a paper with a mere 30,000 unit circulation and would have been fired if I did this.... and I wasn't even being paid.
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I dont' know the specifics of this story, nor what the paper is that printed it, but I would be willing to bet that this happy grandmother looking person with flowers in her hand is not, in fact, a jailed crack cocaine dealer.
This mistake is a bit more forgivable because as someone that had headlines and deadlines (urgh) I kind of depended on the graphical design people to detect things like this for me. I'm sure that whoever this woman is, that she got a real kick out of being featured this way, especially on the front page of what is bound to be her own local newspaper.
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These days something like this would become a sound-byte that is repeated over and over if some politician was to say something like this because everyone knows WHY a sewer smells. I also believe that people would post something like this on purpose for clicks and it is something that just kind of promotes itself. Unfortunately for this particular author, this was just a showcase in someone thinking of words to use and choosing what is likely the worst possible option.
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Sorry for the blur but this was forwarded to me as a ludicrously small .jpg. That's the best I can do as far as enhancing is concerned. I did get some backstory though and this story comes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's Patriot-News and they took this placeholder mistake on the chin and had some fun with it. They admitted their mistake and even did a story about the person responsible for it. I like that they did this rather than doing what we would expect today and call it "unacceptable" and fire the guy for just being hungover that day or whatever.
At the end of the day all of these mistakes fall on the head of the editor of whatever publication these mistakes were made it, this is literally the only reason why their job existed.
We have tools to catch most of these sorts of things today but seeing as how publishing is mostly dead, we probably won't get many examples of something like this anymore that can genuinely be called a "funny mistake." These days when news gets cranked out 50 times a day, outlets don't even apologize for the errors or even acknowledge them.
Why so serious?