Newspaper Typo

[niteowl]

This is a true story.

In newspaper printing, a negative the size of the page is first made, using high-contrast film. But, photographs can't be part of this negative; photos have to "screened", to reduce them to a series of dots. Once a screened negative of the photo is created, it's then pasted into a clear window of the larger page negative. This part is done by hand, so sometimes, the person doing the pasting gets the wrong photo negative in the wrong window. Usually, the result makes no sense.

But one day, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, there were two "big" stories in this small town: the mayor's wife passed away, and the old icehouse, long abandoned, burned to the ground.

On the inside pages, there ran a photo of the icehouse, over a caption that read:

Mayor's Wife Passes Away

While the front page had a photo of the mayor's wife, two columns wide, over a caption that read:

Old Eyesore Gone At Last