Anybody see today’s Parade? The cover story is a huge hopeful story about Benazir Bhutto, clearly written while she was alive and with the expectation that she would still be alive when the magazine went to press. I know they print those things really early, but, seriously, it’s been more than a week! Obviously print news is always at least a little bit out of date - they have to print it, distribute it, deliver it, etc.
So what are some other large or small time-related print mistakes? Either things that were true and events made false, or expectations (like Dewey and Truman) that didn’t go as somebody expected.
Parade goes to press at least a month before the cover date. This isn’t the first time they’ve been overtaken by events.
I did get a copy of the Daily Gazette newspaper the day after Katrina hit New Orleans. Its headline featured the AP report from the middle of the night that indicated the levees held and damage was manageable. I was on vacation and didn’t get TV or Internet, so it was the next day, when my brother-in-law visited, that I learned the first report was wrong.
Also, the Katrina reports about what was going on in the Superdome badly exaggerated the chaos.
And there was the famous Frank Reynolds report that Ronald Reagan was killed by John Hinckley. Reynolds blew up on the air when it was discovered the report was wrong.
In breaking news, though, this probably happens from time to time. Rumors overtake the truth and get reported,
I don’t have specific cites or links to hand, but here in the UK there was a spate of these media ‘hiccups’ as recently as 1992. We had a general election that year. The Conservative (or Tory) government, led by John Major, was widely expected to lose the election. The party was in the mire, Major was a lame duck, and the opinion polls were not good for him or for the party. The opposition Labour party, led by Neil Kinnock, had enjoyed a superb election campaign which is to this day regarded as one of the best such campaigns on record. It was orchestrated with fantastic professionalism, and apart from a touch of hubris during one ‘rally’ close to election day, it was widely regarded as a flawless campaign that was bound to result in victory.
Many weekly news and current affairs magazines were due to be published on either the Thursday of the election itself, or the day after. They obviously had to be written and sent to print before the election result was known. The wise journalists and commentators exercised caution. Others did not, and wrote lengthy ‘informed’ editorial and opinion pieces about why the Conservatives lost and all the reasons for Labour’s victory.
Except that the Conservatives won after all.
It wasn’t some journalists who had to eat their words for a while. All of the major opinion poll organisations got the results badly wrong, and were blustering for weeks afterwards about the reasons for this. To a large extent, they blamed it on people telling them (the pollsters) one thing but then doing another.
Sorry to nitpick but it was Press Secretary James Brady who erroneously had been reported as dying after being shot.
Almost 20 years ago, I read a December 1988 edition of the conservative publication American Spectator that contained commentary clearly written with the expectation that Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis would be victorious.
Altlhough he works as close to the deadline as a cartoonist can, I can remember at least a few times when Garry Trudeau’s written a series of “Doonesbury” strips that ended up being undermined by either late-breaking events or totally unexpected outcomes.
Still, that January 6th Parade cover has got to be one of the most egregious journalistic mishaps ever. I looked through the article and there wasn’t even a short explanation added saying the story had been written before Bhutto’s assassination. This isn’t something that just happened. They had more than two weeks to change things.
So? What if they were printed and distributed three weeks ago?
You can’t throw out tens of millions of issues just because the real world overtook one story. You need to have an issue every week and you need to satisfy the advertising contracts you have to produce the issue.
The real world supersedes stories in publications all the time. I guarantee that every day’s newspaper has outdated news in it. Magazines go to press far earlier than people not in the trade understand and so they are more susceptible to old news being included.
It may be embarrassing and frustrating, but it implies exactly zero about their journalistic ability or integrity.
My local newspaper had been running color announcements for days providing advance notice that the Bhutto story would be in Sunday’s Parade, in spite of her death. Was mine the only one to do this, or are you talking about a paper you only get on Sundays? It might have been good to wrap a cover sheet around **Parade ** if that had been feasible. But I don’t think they’d pull and reprint **Parade ** for anything except possibly the death of a US President when he was on the cover.
Today’s Austin American-Statesman had a color blurb above the fold on the left of the front page explaining that the Parade was printed prior to Bhutto’s death. I cannot imagine any other way to do it. It caught my eye as I first opened the paper.
Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh and last Nizam of Hyderabad, fell seriously ill in early 1967. Then, sometime in February of that year, the Times ran a valedictory story about him below a headline that read ‘Nizam Of Hyderabad Is Dead’.
The following day the same newspaper ran another story under the headline ‘Nizam Of Hyderabad Slightly Better’.
Mir Osman Ali Khan (RIP) eventually died on 24 February 1967.
I don’t recall how much it was reported in the press, or honestly many details of the story, but back in the early days of the telephone a phone survey was conducted for a presidential election. One candidate won the ohine survey by a wide margin but his opponent won the actual election. The surveyors neglected to consider that people with phones would tend to be wealthy and so would skew heavily in favor of the wealthy-appealing candidate.
I didn’t notice anything like that, but on Sunday the patrons keep the paper all day and I have to read it online. I did have several people come up and ask me about it, confused, because they thought she’d died and now they weren’t sure. (Who you gonna trust, the Paper of Record or Parade Magazine? Sheesh.)
It’s not. It’s absolutely normal. The ones who are out of step are the magazines that pay enormous extra costs in order to cut turnaround time down to the absolute minimum. That’s prohibitively expensive and won’t be done unless you’re a newsmagazine and have to compete with timely news.
Nothing in Parade is so timely that a day or two would make a difference. It prints 32 million copies that have to go to 400 newspapers. This probably requires a network of printers to cut down shipping costs. It has to reach each newspaper early enough so that it can be bundled individually with the sections that are printed early from other sources (usually all the feature sections, special advertising sections, tv guide, comics, etc.)
I don’t see any good way to get the start of the printing process any closer than a couple of weeks before issue date, and I’d want to leave even more time that that. Even at 10,000 issues per hour, you’d need 320 hours to get them all done. Even four plants would need 80 hours each. And that doesn’t count setup, stopping for problems, takedown, folding, bundling, and getting them into the trucks. Which then have to drive up to 800 or 1000 miles with many stops.
This all takes time, legitimately so, even by using the latest technologies. And I’m assuming that the editorial and advertising is always there on time, in the right format, to make up the right number of pages, without last minute scrambling to fill holes or remove stuff. Almost anything can bump a deadline, and usually does.
I take it that none of the people wondering about the timing are in the magazine business. I am. None of this surprises me at all. It all sounds skin of the teethish, in fact, in cutting things so fine.
Not that I disagree with your explanation of the probable timeline here, but as someone who used to be involved in newspaper publication it’s not unreasonable for laypeople to wonder, with Bhutto having died on December 27, why a supplement distributed on January 6 would carry this story. If nothing else, it seems likely that Parade could have distributed a page to explain the circumstances of publication.
