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The evening was coming together nicely.
The weather was perfect for a barbecue on the deck. I had just seasoned the steaks. And as I was about to toast the launch of our new newsletter, The Wrap, I got an email from a senior editor: There was a typo in the second sentence of my intro, which we’d just mailed out to 70,000 readers Tuesday night.
The instructions from my brain to my typing fingers led me to believe I had written about the value of a curated evening briefing in “today’s fast-paced world.” Alas, I accidentally typed “fast-faced.” And now I was red-faced.
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Damn.
The dreaded typo is the bane of newsrooms everywhere. No matter how hard we try to avoid these mistakes, no matter the procedures put in place to root them out before publishing/posting, they still find a way to persist.
I could blame typos on the fact we publish hundreds of thousands of words every single day in print and pixels. I could point out our team of editors has ever more on their plates these days as the Free Press keeps adding new offerings for our growing audience.
But in the end, those are just excuses and our readers deserve better than that.
Fortunately, it appears only one subscriber noticed my typo, or at least only one bothered to flag it for us. Also fortunate was the fact that typo paled in comparison to the mother of all typos from my reporting days at our Ottawa bureau.
In that rather unfortunate incident, the typo involved no less than a Manitoban named to the Supreme Court of Canada. Marshall Rothstein was appearing on Parliament Hill as part of a process then-prime minister Stephen Harper introduced to have nominees to the highest court in the land be vetted by a Commons committee.
Rothstein passed that test with flying colours. But in the third paragraph of the story I filed, my typing fingers had me in danger of being cited for contempt of court.
Here’s what I wrote: “The first-ever nominee for the high court to face a pubic grilling wowed MPs with his humility, respect for Parliament’s role and dim view of judicial activism.”
If your eye skipped over the typo, let me assure there’s a world of difference between a public grilling and a pubic grilling.
Nothing’s as thorough as a pubic grilling. (Free Press archives)
Even worse: the headline on the story? “It was like a love-in.”
The funny thing about that typo is although the error was missed by a team of senior production editors, it didn’t escape one eagle-eyed reader, who emailed the next morning to say she hadn’t stopped laughing since reading my story.
Of course, I wasn’t able to laugh then any more than my fast-faced self was able to laugh on Tuesday night.
Here’s hoping that’s the last typo you’ll read from me. But if one does sneak past my editing eye and those of my production staff, I am prepared to face a public grilling.
And I want to assure you I proofread that last line multiple times before hitting send on tonight’s newsletter.
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