News Munchies
Get Your Assets in Gear
By Richard B. Barger, ABC, APR
Originally Posted
Updated
Headline: "Newspaper apologizes for political ad typo. It was supposed to say ‘assets,’ Missouri paper says."
This appeared in a political ad in The Laclede County Record. Those one-word typos will kill you, won't they?
You can see the entire brief article here.
Oh, we could come up with dozens of these things, but here are our two favorites:
Last fall, a headline writer for The Pratt (KS) Tribune handed us [yes, we said that on purpose] a wonderfully embarrassing reminder of the importance of actually reading -- and copyediting -- what you write.
A piece about Disability Mentoring Day at Pratt High School ran with the headline, "Students get first hand job experience."
To begin with, we're not sure how the writer knew it was their first experience.
Reporter: "Hey, boss: Is it 'first hand, or firsthand, or first-hand?'"
"Oh, any of them are fine; your choice."
No, as we have covered elsewhere on CornerBarPR.com®, there are proper ways to use hyphens. Care here would have saved the paper quite a bit of infamy, but would have deprived us of seriously snarky entertainment.
Then, several years ago, in a piece about computers, an in-house newsletter for Yellow Freight once published the worst possible misspelling of "floppy disks." (No, it wasn't "floppy discs" ...)
Well, maybe they knew something.
At any rate, that was the last time the secretarial staff published the Friday News.
For more wonderfully screwed-up headlines, order a copy of "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge." And send us your favorites.