When a joke is no laughing matter

Jokes in newsrooms are often freeflowing and are frequently profane. They’re often riotously funny for the people involved in what is a stressful job.

That is, they’re funny until the jokes get into print.

That’s a lesson The News-Enterprise in Hardin County, Kentucky found out the hard way.

During the publication of Thursday’s edition, two copy editors decided to make a joke out of a quote from Sheriff John Ward about why people go into law enforcement.

In a paraphrased statement, the newspaper reported that Ward said they do so “because they have a desire to shoot minorities.”

As editor Ben Sheroan wrote in an editorial recounting the critical blunder, “Sheriff Ward is not responsible for the statement. He said nothing of the sort.”

The result of the major error is that two copy editors now find themselves out of a job, a reporter finds herself with major egg on her face through no fault of her own and, as Sheroan wrote, the newspaper blew years of trust up in a cloud of smoke.

Sheroan wrote that many angry callers demanded to know if anyone proofreads the newspaper before it goes into print.

Unfortunately, as he wrote, “that’s where the error took place.

“A function and process designed to rid the news pages of error instead added a terrible one that altered the reporter’s original sentence,” he wrote.

To his credit, he also didn’t try to offer a justification for what happened.

“No reasonable excuse can exist.”

Adding in a joke that makes it into print and embarrasses a newspaper is bad enough. Years ago, a copy editor put in a placeholder caption for a person he or she was trying to identify and wrote, “some [expletive].” Unfortunately for everyone involved, that expletive referring to the performer of an act of sexual intercourse made it into print.

Another embarrassing mistake happened when The Bucks Local News, a newspaper based in Pennsylvania, printed an insult of Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Domonic Brown referring to the unusual spelling of his first name.

“*NFP: DOMONIC IS SPELLED RIGHT, HE'S JUST AN IDIOT*”

“NFP” stands for Not for Publication. It was apparently intended for copy editors to not try to spell Domonic in a more traditional manner. Instead, it resulted in a major embarrassment, which resulted in writer Matthew Friedman writing, “the only idiot in this case is me.”

Perhaps in Friedman’s case it was. But these cases point to a critical flaw when it comes to journalism, in particular print media. Story after story of newspapers cutting jobs and some newspapers closing their doors have been rampant over the years. So, too, were directives from newspaper management to “do more with less.”

There’s a huge flaw in that directive. Too often, staffs have been cut to the bone, and in some cases, into the bone, leaving overworked reporters and editors, some of whom end up taking on added responsibilities that they aren’t trained in or aren’t good at.

Some newspapers require their reporters to take photos instead of having a photographer. Some reporters can take photos well. Some can’t. Either way, a reporter having to take photos will see the quality of his or her work suffer in the process.

If a newspaper or a chain of papers takes away a copy editor from a large copy desk, it may have a minimal impact. But if it’s several copy editors who go, it makes it much harder for the people who are left to catch mistakes or write captions or headlines facing mounting deadline pressure.

None of that excuses the horrible mistake on Thursday that resulted in an embarrassing error that looks even worse considering the state of race relations in this country. It shows an appalling lack of sense on the part of the copy editors involved to even make the joke, let alone to allow the joke to make it into print.

The impact to the newspaper itself is a clear loss of credibility, major embarrassment for the reporter involved for that mistake to appear in a story with her byline on it, and a community that is now up in arms. In an age of heightened racial tensions, the impact could have been much, much worse.