Bad headlines in news

in #news2 years ago

I was an unpaid intern as a chief editor for my college newspaper. We had a weekly circulation of around 30,000 papers - which in the grand scheme of things is butkiss compared to actual newspapers that used to exist and even for the few fledgling ones that still operate today in print.

However, during that time where again, I was not paid, I never made mistakes like the ones that I collect for fun. I would have been severely reprimanded and perhaps released from my position that I was not paid for if I had.


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To be fair to this website the name of the award actually is "Bad Sex in Fiction" but they should have done a bit more to explain this in the article, which they did not, in order to not embarrass the dude. This is especially true because of the fact that most people have probably not heard of him or read his work.


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Remember those sections of the paper where you could write in to an editor or someone who worked for the paper for advice as if this person who probably makes less money than you do actually has sage information to hand out? Well, that's what this is from. Grammatically speaking, there is nothing wrong with this but the sheer idiocy of the statement makes this something that is just seriously dumb to print at all.


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Does the person that wrote this have any idea what meteorites are? It "might be" from space you say? Who would have thunk it?


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Any opportunity to point the finger and laugh at government officials is just fine in my book but this is just stupid (dumb).


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This is just mean. I would imagine that the people who got on board for this puff piece in a regional newspaper were probably pretty upset when the article came out but I hope they held on to it and framed it and can look back on it today and have a laugh.


At the end of the day my unpaid internship didn't result in me finding paid work in the journalism field and in many ways I am thankful for this lucky mistake because soon after I graduated college the newspaper industry began to freefall to the point where it is today - which is almost non-existent. There are still some editors employed out there but since they can correct their mistakes on the fly just like I can open this article later and totally change it, the stakes are much lower than they used to be.

Editing was a very precise art back then and one where mistakes could not simply be erased by opening another tab on Brave. I would presume that all of the people that let these terrible headlines get past them, intentional or not, were paid for their positions as well. While I was upset about not being able to find a job at the time, things kind of worked out for me in the end and I am not unhappy that I didn't get that job because it almost certainly wouldn't exist today, no matter how much I excelled at it.


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