We’re just a week into the new year, and there have already been a few high-profile flops in the news.
Yahoo Finance had a very unfortunate typo in a tweet on Jan. 5.
In a now-deleted tweet, Yahoo Finance meant to post “Trump wants a much bigger navy: Here’s how much it’ll cost.”
However, Yahoo Finance used the n-word instead of bigger.
After lots of social media attention to the tweet, Yahoo deleted it. Yahoo Finance tweeted an apology after the fact.
The Toronto Star‘s public editor Kathy English flagged an early contender for “typo of the year.” A print article’s subheadline accidentally inserted the letter h into the word sits, making it so the curse word appeared in a large font on the front page of the paper’s Entertainment & Life section.
Star editor Michael Cooke apologized for the “true shocker” typo. English explained it was just a typo that made it through to publication and not intentional. English noted that since it was printed during the holidays, “the newsroom was short-staffed.” To his credit, production editor Doug Graham accepted full responsibility for the slip-up, while noting he doesn’t know exactly how it happened. He told English, “it’s completely my fault. I am not trying to pass the buck in any way.”
The Washington Post Express, a free daily tabloid from the Washington Post slipped up when it used the symbol for male instead of female on its cover. Why was it a problem? Because the cover story and focus was on the Women’s March on Washington. When asked how the error occurred, The Washington Post’s spokesperson Kris Coratti pointed to the Express‘s tweets.
The Washington Post Express Twitter account noted that the corrected image would be published Jan. 6.