I hope the Salt Lake Tribune doesn't mind me sharing a little nugget from their wonderful publication:
By Donald W. Meyers
Provo » The phone call Rich Evans got Monday morning wasn't good news.
It was an employee at Brigham Young University's The Daily Universe , where Evans is the editorial manager. There was a typo on the front page.
"It was the worst possible mistake," Evans recalled.
The error? A caption on a photo from this weekend's LDS General Conference stated that "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning. ..."
The newspaper staff retrieved as many of the 18,500 copies of the paper as possible and reprinted them with the correction. And it issued an apology to the apostles. The staff also explained how it happened: an error in spell-checking.
It started when a student misspelled the word "apostle" when writing the photo caption. When the caption was put through the editing software's spell checker, it was flagged, and the editor accidentally clicked the first word that came up on the correct list: "apostate." The mistake made it past two proofreaders before being sent off to the printing press.
"It would have been worse if it were done intentionally, as some have thought," Evans said. "But after talking to the people, we found it was an innocent mistake." He said one of the students involved was in tears over it.
A story on the Universe's Web site stated this was the first time in more than 30 years that the paper had to trash an edition. Evans said the staff will be implementing efforts to prevent a recurrence.
"This appears to have been an honest mistake," said BYU spokeswoman Carri P. Jenkins. A church spokesman declined to comment.
Student journalists aren't the only ones to make mistakes in print. Last week, The Salt Lake Tribune misidentified LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson in a headline. It identified the LDS leader as "Gordon Monson," the same name as a Tribune sports columnist.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
April 7, 2009 at 12:54 PM
I think it's absolutely hilarious how much they freaked out over it. "The worst possible mistake"? Really? There's nothing else you can think of that might have been worse?
Their fear that they might have offended the holy, holy honour of those 12 apostates (which is more accurate a title than apostle) is just too funny for words.
“We are reprinting the paper and we will have the corrected version back on the racks by mid-afternoon,” Rawlins said. “This shows the deep concern we have on the matter. We don’t think this error is glib or cute or humorous. We understand people will take offense to the error. We ourselves are offended as a department for this error. We have a deep regret that it appeared in today’s paper.”
April 7, 2009 at 1:01 PM
I can certainly think of a million other things that would be worse than this. It's HILARIOUS!!!
I want a copy of that paper SOOOOO bad.
April 7, 2009 at 8:16 PM
Well SOMEONE's getting excommunicated this week!!
April 7, 2009 at 9:29 PM
Haha, you know that kid is getting a serious "talking-to" about this. Holy freaking crap. I wonder if he peed his pants.
April 13, 2009 at 1:37 PM
I briefly dated a girl who worked for the Daily Universe while I was at BYU.
She covered student elections and BYUSA (our sorry excuse for a student-body presidency). Once she ran an article detailing how every last campaign promise made by the candidates was already being taken care of by the student advisory council (the real place work gets done - all the BYUSA presidency ever does is look pretty at banquets and photo ops). She got a lot of nasty looks from the candidates for that.
She'd tell me about how the various BYUSA competitors would constantly bother her with reports of campaign rule violations. The best way to win a BYUSA election is to get the other side DQ-ed on a technicality, and it happens - a lot. She got really sick of it and considered the whole lot of them some of the most pompous stuffed shirts she'd ever met.
There was a constant rivalry between the Daily Universe and the BYUSA presidency. They were always whining about how they weren't being reported on "fairly." At one point they went whining to President Bateman himself (you know - former LDS Presiding Bishop). Anyway, they held a meeting with the President lecturing the Universe staff.
At that point my friend raised her hand and proceeded to refute every last BYUSA gripe with hard data to back it up. Pres. Bateman was rather taken aback and thanked her for all the information.
Later he offered her a job on his staff. I don't recall if she accepted. She said she'd think about it.
Fun girl, but I moved a bit too slow, and lost my window of opportunity with her.