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Dewey Defeats TrumanCopy desk blunders
The classic
History
Buff's Home Page:
Slow election returns.
Deadline looming. Inexperienced staff.
Unfortunate typos. Sound like a night you'd
like to forget? It's part of the story behind
the Dewey Defeats Truman headline
debacle at the Chicago Daily Tribune. The
headline was fixed, but not before many
papers were delivered. Trucks were dispatched
to pick them off of lawns in the wee hours.
In addition, many fixes were made on the
front page with type "X'd" out by a
typewriter. Some of the type was upside down.
Most of it never was fixed. A comforting read
when you think YOU have had a bad night.
By the way, History Buff's is a great site put together by R.J. Brown and the Newspaper Collectors Society of America. Click around and find all kinds of stuff, such as how much a 1969 moon-landing edition is worth, why newspapers -- mostly in Louisiana -- were printed on wallpaper during the U.S. Civil War and more things they never taught us in The History of American Journalism.
Minor tragedies
A clown jewel: In a now well-known blunder, the Kansas City Star, in its July 30, 1999, issue, published a file photo of a clown to illustrate a Clown Week event. The photo caption -- "It's a rule. You MUST celebrate Clown Week, starting Sunday at City Market" -- only added to the sick irony. Presumably, a copy editor selected this photo and did not recognize serial killer John Wayne Gacy in his "Pogo the Clown" get-up. Readers were distressed. Here's the Star's response.
When wind breaks, we cover it: I would be remiss in not mentioning one of the Houston Chronicle news copy desk's recent embarrassments. In the Jan. 17, 1999, edition, we failed to catch a bad translation of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's bilingual inauguration slogan. The Chronicle published it thusly: "Together We Can -- Juntos Pedemos." The Spanish version reads: "Together We Fart." Here's the correction:
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