Student Media: When Copy Editors Fail

From the "It sure could be worse" file:

Brigham Young University's student newspaper, The Daily Universe, ran a photo in its Monday morning edition of a vote at the Latter Day Saints General Conference. The cutline (what a layperson may refer to as a caption) stated the following:

"Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning."

If you've grown up around church you know that Apostate is not something a religious person would want to be called. Especially when you consider that the actual name is Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. And especially when your group is one of the governing bodies of the religious group that is affiliated with Brigham Young University and your newspaper.

This would be like the Bison calling Jimmy Allen -- one of the church of Christ's legendary preachers -- Jimmy Antichrist. More or less.

Apparently the students tried to pick up all of the copies that had not already been taken. Then they ordered an expensive re-run.

This is why every adviser at church-sponsored schools dies before they reach old age. The night before delivery is always a bit restless, especially if you know there is something that could be considered controversial in the issue. Let me add from experience that there is always something that will be considered controversial by someone, even more so at a religious school.

For example, this week I have heard of people upset that we ran pieces on a student working for a Palestinian health organization, a fashion show highlighting unsustainable clothing companies (and sustainable ones), a photo showing the protests at the G20 summit and a column from a Bible professor suggesting Christians and theistic evolutionists work together.

All in a week's work.

But I sure feel for that BYU adviser. Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes, well, he eats you.

Here's that link.

Hed Bustology

"Spurs Beats Jazz"

If in noticing the above headline's noun-verb disagreement you became uncontrollably violent, then you definitely need to see a shrink, and you might be a good replacement for my former copy desk chief. I wrote this headline during my first three months on my first job out of college. The headline appeared on an inside sports page — specifically the NBA/WNBA page that was my charge that fateful evening. In my defense, I was loaded down with livestock-grade tranquilizers to numb the pain in my lower left wisdom tooth, which badly needed a root canal. My original headline was "Duncan Beats Jazz," referring to the Spurs' center's domination of that evening's NBA contest. In order to run a lead-hed sized font, (read: really big headline) I needed to shorten the headline. Unfortunately, my proofreaders and I failed to catch the fact that I had left the verb singular. This would not have been a big issue (for some) if the Jazz (or Magic or Heat) had won the game. However, my mistake did not make it past the copy chief, who roundly thrashed me as I returned to the rim the next day.

"Arkansas Hall Of Fame To Inducted Former HU Coach"

The above headline found its way into the worst possible location of the Bison this week: front page, above the fold. The first edition to arrive on time this year greeted me as I arrived to work this morning. I was worried about the printing on a couple of pages (you never know what you are going to get) so I popped one out, and I noticed the hed bust immediately. I asked my assistant if we had enough White Out to cover the whole shipment.

The original headline was "Former HU Coach To Be Inducted Into Hall Of Fame." I'm not the world's most ardent believer in the fallibility of the passive-voice sentence, but I thought this hed in particular would read better actively. I wrote on the proof's margins the first headline, minus the noun-verb problem. This, unfortunately, occurred at 11 p.m. The proof was returned and considered "corrected" until it was packaged and exported to PDF the next morning. No one had rechecked the "corrected" page (copy editors and advisers included) before the final process.

So who's to blame? The Bison policy, as it is with every paper I've ever worked for, should be to reprint pages that have had significant changes requested by editors or copy editors. This is usually the case, but Thursday we made the editor's critical mistake of assuming corrections had been made on one page as we turned our attention to more pressing pages. The page should have been reprinted after the headline change.

Unfortunately, all of us as a staff share in this failure. We should have followed Bison protocol on this. At a larger newspaper, one copy editor will handle press duties each night. This involves traveling to wherever the press is held (for many bigger papers, the newsroom is centrally located while the press is tucked away across town). When the editor gets to the press, he or she has precious little time to check all the trouble spots in an entire paper while the press continues to adjust their settings and plates to find the best printing. Once the press workers have their settings figured, the presses roll. The only way to stop them is to find a MAJOR mistake. A front-page, above-the-fold hed bust would definitely apply. Unfortunately for the Bison, we have no access to our press, and we have to rely on getting it right the first time.

These things happen, even to the most reputable of newspapers. As with any university-funded publication, many people on campus view the student paper as an emasculated tool of the administration, so this slight won't affect their opinion. For others, this is one more knock on our credibility. It will take some work to convince them otherwise, but it's something I know the staff cares greatly about.