When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, Power Line caught the New York Times accidently publishing a boilerplate obituary that accidentally went out with a paragraph that consisted entirely of the words “need some quote from supporter”, indicating where a quote would go–ideally before the paper actually went to press! (Supporters of the pope are apparently in very short supply these days in the house that Pinch built.)
But the L.A. Times really takes journalistic minimalism to a new extreme. While their “Keep Rockin’” moment of silence last year during the John Edwards scandal was a classic, not even Philip Glass or Mies van der Rohe could boil things down to these basics!
Related: “Think a very big DMV newsletter.”
I’m ashamed to admit this. I showed my wife, a school teacher, the LA Times item with the glaring typos and nonsense headlines. She could not see what the problem was. Now, this isn’t a case of stupidity, I guarantee. After I explained it (rolls eyes) her reason for missing the problem was twofold. One was bizarre, the other scary. First she thought the uncapitalized headline of “tag briefs subhead large” was just some jargon she didn’t understand, and its presence in a newspaper didn’t faze her. However the really scary thing was that she actually didn’t READ the words. She said, “I’m just grab, delete… grab, delete… I’m in too much of a hurry to think about what it says.” This is why we are really, really in deep trouble. Maybe so am I.
Based on that, the Roscommon County Herald-News and the Houghton Lake Resorter are more professional.
Though I understand what Sadly Anonymous is writing. It sounds like too few people available to do the job in the time given, and no amount of reorganization can cure that type of problem.