Editors Need a Dirty Mind
Charles Apple, a former graphics editor for the Virginian-Pilot and the Des Moines Register (and now teaches graphic design), says in an essay for the American Copy Editors Society that editors need to have a dirty mind. Copy editors have final approval over newspaper graphics and headlines, and they're supposed to keep stuff like this from appearing in print:
USA Today graphic from July 1, 2011, showing the sun "getting hot"
while playing with its erect "thermometer".
Graphic types seem to have a particular fascination with phallic images. Here's the illustration for a doctor's column on belly pain, from summer 2010:
The New York Times chose to show this painful condition as a snake coming out
of a man's pants. In case you didn't quite catch it, a magnifying glass
provides ...uh... enlargement and focus.
It's not just graphics, of course. This headline in February 2011 didn't leave a lot to the imagination:
Girls' schools still offering 'something special' -- head shouts the extra-large
Gloucestershire (England) Echo headline.
(In the U.K., they call school principals the "Head Teacher".)
"You need to have a dirty mind to be in the business of mass communications," Apple concludes. "Or, at the very least, you need someone with a dirty mind on your staff. Because you do not want to give the sixth grader in all of us this kind of viral amusement."
(Source)
Posted July 8, 2011 8:00 AM
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