The Hardy Boys were on the case

While working for the regional daily newspaper, I spent time in a lot of towns that were also covered by hyper-local community papers. I read them for two reasons, not necessarily in this order: 1) to see if they had something interesting that we didn’t; and 2) to look for mistakes. Small papers like this are rife with awesome errors -- the result, I assume, of inexperienced, small staffs. For that, I suppose I shouldn’t hold these things against them; it’d be like mocking a toddler every time it fell. But I’m a jerk: I hung on to a lot of these errors for my own amusement, sometimes even hanging them on the wall in my office. Now that I’m not competing against these papers anymore, it’s time to share.

The one above is from a teeny-tiny thing called the Athol Daily News. They have notoriously confusing front-page layouts -- headlines stretching over different stories, pictures that don’t match -- but this front page slayed me: New York’s most-wanted man, it turns out, is a 10-year-old boy, and they took his mugshot during math class! He “accepted money to kill woman”... because he reallllly needed it to buy a Nintendo Wii before all the kids at school thought he was a dork. (In fact, it’s a totally unrelated picture honoring some kid for being a good paperboy.)

More to come.

Posted by Jason Feifer at March 26, 2007 09:03 AM