When I was in college I took on an unpaid internship with the college newspaper as an editor. I eventually got "promoted" to the top job and took it very seriously and am happy to say that in the one semester that I had the lead job that there were only a few typos that made it past me. I will admit that I had a very good team and can't take all the credit. Later on, I couldn't find a job anywhere in journalism and it wasn't because I wasn't good at it, I had proven that I was. There simply weren't any jobs because I graduated during a time that print advertising was already doomed. Perhaps it is a good thing that I didn't get hired because I would have been let go just like basically everyone else as the world transitioned away from print.
I do like to search around a bit here and there for headlines and mistakes that happened in real newspapers that had paid staff though and kind of stand back in awe at the fact that these people were paid for this job.
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There is probably a decent explanation for why this was worded this way such as the fact that October 31st may have been on Wednesday. This in now way excuses this rather funny mistake. Next time someone says "what time are we meeting tonight" I'll say "8pm or next week."
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When I see things like this I can't help but feel as though someone was in the mail in opinion section of the paper and just felt like taking the piss out of some of the comments that people make. Could it be early notions of trolling? I certainly hope so because if not the person in charge of these headlines is an idiot.
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The omission of a couple of words really does make a huge difference. Imagine being a non-native English speaker that took this literally?
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These used to happen quite a lot because the default placeholder text, commonly known as "Lorem Ipsum" was used in all sorts of publication software so that the user could get an idea of what the whole article would look like before typing anything. The idea is that you would change the text. However, I suspect that this was someone that made their own placeholder singe the asdf is in there, and then they just forgot to go back and change it before it went to print. Either this paper had no editor, or it was someone who shouldn't have had that job.
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One of the main jobs of an editor or layout director at newspapers wasn't just to serve as a manual spell-checker but also to handle the overall layout of the paper. In my paper, only a few people on staff actually had any idea what the final product was actually going to look like, the reporters and writers simply submitted individual articles. This photo is clearly not related to the article in question and to me it makes me wonder if it was done on purpose. Since this was published in 2012 it was near the end of print publications anyway, so the editor may have just given up on caring and was having some fun with the last few months of employment.
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I would imagine that this was much more difficult back in the day before we had really advanced software to preview what the layout was going to look like once printed... but even back in the 90's we had a computer generated version of the layout, including advertisement placement, long before anything was printed. This almost certainly was done on purpose. I'm sure the women in the pictures were delighted to be included in something slightly lewd.
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When the name of your magazine is "Where" you should probably be very careful with how you position people that are on the cover. Whoever that model is, if she has any sense of humor, I certainly hope that this is framed and on the wall of her house. That's where mine would go anyway.
In a way I kind of miss print publications. Just like a printed book there was a certain level of authenticity to it and I think that back in those days we were probably still being lied to by the media, but at least they were a bit more careful because issuing retractions was a much more difficult affair when print was all that there was. These days news outlets intentionally print bogus information and then later apologize and retract their statements in a later article that nobody ever reads. This is why so many people that you and I know are completely misinformed about almost everything.
We didn't realize how good we had it back in the days of daily news.
