Monday, April 06, 2009

The Twelve Apostates

My friend Dave Golding pointed this out to me today.

From today's Daily Universe at BYU:


Apparently this typo resulted in a complete recall and reprint of today's issue. Here is the Daily Universe's account of the typo and recall.

Another funny typo can be found in the fourth to last paragraph of the article explaining the eror:
Administrators in the Department of Communications said they were interviewing students and staff Monday to determine how the eror happened. Apparently a student copy editor used InDesign’s spell check function to check all the photo captions. The student told Evans that InDesign suggested the misspelled word and the student failed to catch the error.
Gotta love typo erors when discussing typo erors.

Does anybody know if/when a total recall of the paper has happened before? I wonder what other kinds of problems might result in such a recall and reprint.

7 comments:

  1. any copies of the original on ebay yet?

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  2. I have viewed a scan of the original Universe front page, 6 April 2009. It is as breath taking a newspaper mistake as "Dewey Defeats Truman" or "Governor Thompson's pen is a sword."

    I have also read the Universe's official apology and Carri Jenkin's damage control both calling "The 12 Apostates" an honest mistake typographical error.

    Typographical error my foot.

    The Universe cannot get away with this outrage by trying to define it as a typographical error.

    The Universe has editors. Where were they? A personal insult / Freudian slip of this magnitude takes planning, especially when a paper should have multiple errors . . . . uh, editors to catch such Freudian slip / "Typographical errors."

    As a journalist, I have my own horror stories to tell about sloppy editing. I extend the hand of reassuring fellowship. Thank God for the atonement. The Universe needs it.

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  3. As a former copy editor, i can say with certainty that this is simply a spell-check error - nothing more, nothing less.

    rightascension is wrong. Anyone, mormon or not, who is reacting to this in any way other than laughter, needs to stop being so paranoid.

    It's pretty funny.

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  4. There's a reason I always referred to that paper as "The Daily Uni-farce". I saw so many baffling errors in that paper. For example, in 2002 when the Angels were leading the World Series 2 games to 1 over the Giants, they played a late game for game 4 and were leading. The Daily Uni-farce went ahead prematurely and printed a headline that read "Angels take 3-1 lead". Woops! The Giants came back to win that game tying the series 2-2. That is just one of many annoying editing errors in that paper.

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  5. Woops, I was signed in under the wrong account, sorry.

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  6. This appears to be only the second time the DU as been recalled:

    http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/305163/17/

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  7. The DU has published an editorial on the mistake.

    The article begins by saying that "[t]he Daily Universe ran a photo caption Monday that misspelled the word 'apostle' as another word that has a very different and opposite meaning." Apparently, "apostate" is such a bad word that the DU is unwilling to even repeat it.

    The editorial continues: "[W]e love and cherish our faith, church and our church leaders and would not do anything to intentionally cause them harm. . . . We have been humbled by this experience and we have learned a few painful lessons."

    I realize that it was a pretty significant mistake, but it was also a pretty hilarious one. I wish more of us could have a sense of humor about this. I'd like to think that the Twelve Apostates, er, Apostles, would.

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