A botched headline on the front page of a local newspaper in England will be forever remembered. But not for a reason its editors would want.
This week, the Cambridge News went to press with this headline:
It should have read ”£2m FOR ‘SEX LAIR’ SCHOOL.”
Instead, it contained the place-holding text of “100PT SPLASH HEADING HERE.” Two photographs on the page were captioned correctly.
Someone shared a photograph of the blunder to Twitter, and it went viral:
David Bartlett, the publication’s editor-in-chief, apologized to readers via a statement on its website.
It “happened due to a technical problem,” Bartlett said. “We are still looking into how this happened and want our readers to know we take this seriously.”
The mistake caused much hilarity, but former Cambridge News reporter Alice Hutton highlighted how it was symptomatic of widespread cuts to the United Kingdom’s newspaper industry.
“You may think this error is funny (and who doesn’t look a good subbing error?) but in this case you are laughing at the dismantling of local democracy, the ability to fight for communities and the loss of dozens of livelihoods,” Hutton wrote on Twitter.