It’s bad enough when you make a typo on a headline on page one. That puts you in this blog.
But what happens when you use the wrong page one?
The “incorrect page,” I’m told, was the Sunday front of the Chapel Hill News. What ran instead — again, in this case — was the previous Wednesday’s front.
Here is the Chapel Hill News web site as it appears this morning (Wednesday, Nov. 2)…
…and a closer look at that little blue box.
My anonymous source summed it up well. “Excellence from McClatchy’s central production facility,” he wrote. “Which I think is what Stalin called collective farms right before the famine.”
Sigh…
Hopefully that rate increase will help prevent this from happening again in the future.
What’s even better is they are announcing a price increase right under the correction! Expect to pay more for what? The quality?!
Not at all unheard of — unfortunately. When I was with another company (a major southeastern media group) as a sports editor, we moved our printing operation to the regional hub, and they pulled the previous day’s sports front, which didn’t have the all-county football team as was promised. The uproar, both internally and externally, was loud and ugly. This is when the centralized desk idea started being kicked around; that move set it back a few years. As you continue to cull people from the operation and the ones who are left are expected to do more while having their wages frozen for the last four years, I expect to see more of this.
Charles, it’s not accurate or fair to attribute this mistake solely to the publication center in Charlotte. It results from an unfortunate combination of circumstances involving equipment, communication and human error on both ends. We’ve all been reminded how important it is to double check everything.
It’s vogue to mock centralized production centers, but doing so won’t make them go away. This error was not the result of an inherent flaw in their production process, no matter how much anyone would like to believe it is because it makes them feel better about how their newspaper is put together. This mistake could happen at any publication with a suitably complicated production system — not that that makes the result any more desirable.
When I was at the News & Observer, one person on the copy desk had the duty each night of going to the pressroom as each edition was printed. On occasion, this editor would catch this sort of problem before it got out the door and to readers.
Was there an editor on site in this case?