Headline howlers and other bloopers

UPDATE (October 15, 2013): Friend and former colleague David D'Souza has helpfully posted a link on Facebook to a website that has unearthed more publishing howlers. Check it out here: "Unfortunate publishing layouts of our time".

UPDATE (June 18, 2014): Commitscion Ashwin Shanker (Class of 2015) posted this link on my Facebook timeline today: “Homicide Victims Rarely Talk to Police,” and Other Horrible Headlines. Thanks, Ashwin! 

UPDATE (July 2, 2014): Sai Sir has just e-mailed this list to me with the subject line, "Have fun in class!"

58 Headlines They Didn't Mean!

Headlines are important. They advertise and market the information that follows. Sometimes, it goes horribly wrong...

1. Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
2. Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
3. Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted
4. Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
5. Survivor of Siamese Twins Joins Parents
6. Farmer Bill Dies in House
7. Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
8. Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?
9. Stud Tires Out
10. Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
11. Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
12. Soviet Virgin Lands Short of Goal Again
13. British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
14. Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms
15. Eye Drops off Shelf
16. Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
17. Reagan Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead
18. Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
19. Shot Off Woman's Leg Helps Nicklaus to 66
20. Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax
21. Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told
22. Miners Refuse to Work after Death
23. Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
24. Stolen Painting Found by Tree
25. Two Soviet Ships Collide, One Dies
26. Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter
27. Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years
28. Never Withhold Herpes Infection from Loved One
29. Drunken Drivers Paid $1000 in `84
30. War Dims Hope for Peace
31. If Strike isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last a While
32. Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
33. Enfields Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
34. Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge
35. Deer Kill 17,000
36. Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
37. Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
38. New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
39. Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
40. Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
41. Chef Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
42. Arson Suspect is Held in Massachusetts Fire
43. British Union Finds Dwarfs in Short Supply
44. Ban On Soliciting Dead in Trotwood
45. Lansing Residents Can Drop Off Trees
46. Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
47. New Vaccine May Contain Rabies
48. Man Minus Ear Waives Hearing
49. Deaf College Opens Doors to Hearing
50. Air Head Fired
51. Steals Clock, Faces Time
52. Prosecutor Releases Probe into Undersheriff
53. Old School Pillars are Replaced by Alumni
54. Bank Drive-in Window Blocked by Board
55. Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
56. Some Pieces of Rock Hudson Sold at Auction
57. Sex Education Delayed, Teachers Request Training
58. Include your Children When Baking Cookies

Speaking with authority

Mint has this great series called Spot Light for advertising and marketing professionals. An expert is asked to comment on an ad campaign, the new Adidas TVC, for example, and his or her views convey a great deal to us about why something works (or doesn't).

Here's Prakash Varma (the Hutch pug, the Vodafone zoozoos) on the Adidas campaign.

Advertising and marketing students will benefit from bookmarking Spot Light and reading the comments every week.

Real? Staged? The NYT Public Editor weighs in on a serious journalistic issue

"The front page of Sunday’s Times carried an arresting photo atop an investigative article about the dangers of driving while distracted by a cellphone. Shot from the back seat of a car going more than 60 miles per hour — the speedometer is plainly visible — the picture showed a 16-year-old driver texting with both hands while another youth in the passenger seat steadied the steering wheel with his left hand.

"Readers wondered if the picture was real or staged, whether the photographer did anything to stop the risky behavior — and who these teens were and how they related to the accompanying article, which never mentioned them and focused on another young man living with the consequences of causing a fatal accident while talking on his cellphone."

Go here to read the full column:

See how this column incorporates readers' reactions and then clarifies the position by talking to the photographer involved. What do you think?

• Photo courtesy: The New York Times

The plagiarism case that shook the New York Times to its foundations

Go to this page for links to New York Times stories related to the Jayson Blair plagiarism case.

• The best book on the subject is Hard News, by Seth Mnookin. It's available in the Commits library. Hard News also gives you an amazing insight into how one of the world's great newspapers works.

• And here's the NYT's national editor Suzanne Daley (pictured) answering a reader's question about the case:

    The Legacy of Jayson Blair

Q. Is it too soon to ask about the legacy of Jayson Blair for the National Desk? Do you think The Times learned the right lessons? Is it possible for a news organization, stung so badly, to become too cautious in its pursuit of the news?
    — Donald Frazier, Denver
 

A. I don’t think anyone around here is going to thank Jayson Blair any time soon for the shame he brought to this institution. But much good came out of his deplorable behavior. His legacy permeates our newsroom.

    In the aftermath of Mr. Blair’s fabrications, we did a lot of soul searching and developed all sorts of new policies and training on ethics, conflict of interest, anonymous sourcing.

    We now have a public editor, Clark Hoyt, who takes in complaints from the public and publishes weekly critiques of our work. We also have a high-level editor inside the newsroom, who is responsible for standards and ethics. On top of that, each desk must track its errors and who made them. I get monthly summaries so I can identify the worst trespassers on the National Desk.

    We also decided to be a lot more transparent about who was contributing to the stories in our paper. When I started here, there were all kinds of crazy byline rules, grandfathered in long ago for who knows what reason. There was a policy, for instance, that you were only allowed one byline in the paper even if you had written two stories (even on the front page.) And only staff reporters could have bylines at all in the news sections. That meant a sizable number of stories had no bylines and a reader could not tell who wrote or reported them. Now, we spell it all out in sometimes lengthy contributor boxes.

    And we have increased our efforts to respond to the public with features like "Talk to the Newsroom."

    Have we become too cautious? Nope. Not in my book.

• For more Q&A with Suzanne Daley, go here. 

UPDATE (August 2, 2013): Commitscion ASWATHY MURALI (Class of 2015) has made the valuable suggestion that there should be something on the Reading Room blog about the hoax that shook the Washington Post to its foundations: "Jimmy's World", the story by Janet Cooke that won her a Pulitzer Prize but was later proved to be a fabrication. You can get all the details on "Story Lab", a very interesting blog published by the newspaper: Story pick: Janet Cooke and "Jimmy's World".

(What is Story Lab?  According to the "About" page, this is "where readers and reporters will come together to create and shape stories. Washington Post writers will talk about some of the hard choices involved in journalism". Read the description in its entirety here.)

Also read:

• "The problem of plagiarism"

• "The India Today plagiarism scandal — and an apology of sorts"

• "Plagiarism is okay, says DNA executive editor in an apology for a column"

"How TV news is distorting India's media"

This is a 2006 post by a BBC South Asia bureau editor, but some of the points he is making are still valid.

• If you go to the end, you will see he has a dig at himself too.

I asked Ayesha Tabassum (Class of 2007), who is a producer with Times Now in Mumbai, to comment on this piece. Here's her feedback:

It's a fair picture he has given about the current situation in television news. But certain points seem to be exaggerated...

LIKE THIS ONE:

The former Home Minister Indrajit Gupta was one day doggedly pursued by a young journalist on his way out of parliament.

When he finally agreed to stop for the news crew, he was asked the probing question. "Sir, would you please say something". The second question was "and Sir, who are you?"

No channel would send out a reporter who is ignorant about the basic facts... even if you are not active on the field you cannot afford to ignore basic facts and information about your government and ministers or any other topic under the sun. Google is always out there to help you out (Wikipedia is not always reliable, though).

BUT THIS ONE:

One young woman described herself in the opening line of her CV to my office as being "young and vivacious".

HAPPENS WAY TOO OFTEN

Particularly at Hindi news channel offices (sorry to sound biased but, trust me, it happens most of the times).

How do you get a one-on-one interview with someone who has been on the run from the law?

"[Koteshwar] Rao has been on the run from law enforcement bodies for 31 years and is guarded by a protective circle of 25 bodyguards. The 51-year-old Maoist leader refused to be photographed and set his own terms for the meeting. Mint’s reporters were asked to arrive at a school in Chakadoba where they waited for around 5 hours. At around dusk, they were escorted to where Rao was — a clearing in the jungle that was reached after a brisk 30-minute walk."

Read the full interview by Romita Datta and Aveek Datta in Mint here.

• Photo courtesy: Mint

• UPDATE (NOVEMBER 25, 2011): Koteshwar Rao, better known as Kishanji, was killed yesterday in a gun battle with security forces in West Bengal. Read details here.

Here's a well-written feature from the WSJ...

...on how "rural advertising comes to life in India". Note the micro-to-macro approach. Eric Bellman begins his feature by telling us about wedding singer turned travelling salesman Sandeep Sharma before going on, in the fifth paragraph, to enlighten us on the lavish spending habits of India's rural consumers.

"What should be done about Americanisms?"

What I admire about The National, a newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, is, first, its neat and clean look; second, its attention to detail; and, third, its obsession with good writing. We have copies in the library — when you read it, you will quickly realise that the stories follow the rules we discuss in class.

The language column in The National is a must-read for all those interested in improving their writing skills. My Word, is written by the paper's executive editor, Colin Randall, a former Telegraph (UK) journalist. We have often discussed in class the use of Americanisms — here's Randall's take.

Go here for his latest columns, including one on exclamations.

A savvy, must-watch documentary on the peerless P. Sainath

For three decades, he has written about the impact of "development" on the rural poor. In 2007, he won the Magsaysay Award. And he is currently the Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu.

Now he is also the subject of a new documentary Nero's Guests produced by his former student, who has been filming him since 2004.

Here's an excerpt from an interview in Time Out Bengaluru with the documentary maker, Deepa Bhatia:

P. Sainath is notoriously averse to being filmed. How did you manage to make a documentary about him?

Finnish documentary commissioning editor Iikka Vehkalahti has known Sainath for a very long time and he has been trying to get Sainath to be a part of a film for years, but Sainath consistently refused. I met Iikka and I told him, let’s start filming Sainath and see where it goes. Sainath was reporting very aggressively at that time on the agrarian crisis. He would go to the countryside and I would shoot him or get him filmed. I shot sporadically, without any intent of making a film or knowing what it would be about.

• Find out more about Nero's Guests here.
• Mint's Lounge supplement has also published a brief article on the documentary.
• I have bought a copy of the DVD for the college — among the many important reasons for our AVC students to watch it: learn how to make a documentary on a public figure tacking a public crisis.
• Photo courtesy: Time Out Bengaluru

Shivram Sujir (Class of 2011) watched the documentary a few days ago. Here's his take on Nero's Guests:

This is one of those documentaries that every so-called 'educated' citizen in India should watch. The one who thinks India is all about information technology. The one who takes pride in the fact that our GDP growth is the highest. The one who feels great that we are one of the fastest growing economies of the world and is enthralled by the idea of globalisation.

Magsaysay award winner P. Sainath, whose work is the subject of this documentary, may come across as a grumpy, angry, and frustrated man but what else can you expect of a warrior who has been fighting a lone battle for three decades watching his countrymen fall one by one to the arrows of corporatisation and industrialisation? His account of how our definition of development has caused complete devastation in the lives of farmers and led to the agrarian crisis is like a tête-à-tête with the real India and the slow death she is dying at the hands of Nero's guests.

Wonder who Nero's guests are? Watch the documentary. You'll be surprised.

• Nero's Guests is now available on YouTube; watch it here.

The best writing tip of all time: Sit

Having trouble getting the writing done?

Chip Scanlan of Poynter Online, the best resource for journalists that I know of, has some helpful advice for you.