Of all the varied professions I have been in, I find the print media job, especially editing, the most stressed out. Some days, news just pours in moments before the page sign offs and the editorial staff have to race against time. During the thick of the things, working under enormous pressure and constraints of font type and size, column lengths, single lines which limit the number of alphabets, the headlines given some times unwittingly create double meanings, different meanings and outright embarrassing howlers. And they pass through at least two levels of validation before they get printed. I too was guilty of such howlers during my stint. Here are a few that I remember to have caused me to smile and sometimes split with laughter.
A recent one on Delhi Police coming down heavily on jaywalkers:-
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers
A not so recent one on Bush and Iraq
Bush Wins Vote On Iraq, But More Lies Ahead
Headline for a story on the Golf Champion, Tiger Woods using his own golf balls during practice sessions.
Tiger Woods Plays With His Own Balls, Says Nike
Headline for a news item on scraping the bottom of a ship, Queen Mary
Queen Mary Gets Her Bottom Scraped
After packs of dogs have created havoc by attacking students of a college in Hyderabad recently, one newspaper headline said
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victims
Some more gems from the memory lane
Clinton Lies on Lewinsky
Iraq Head Seeks More Arms
Panda Mating Fails - Vet Takes Over
Cold Wave Linked To Rising Temperatures
Two Ships Collide - One Dies
Miners Refuse To Work After Death
Eye Drops Off Shelf
New Vaccine May Contain Rabies
March Planned In May
Crash Courses For Pilots
Man Found Dead In Graveyard
Dead Man Returns
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge
When some two decades back, after a gap of several years the endangered bird, The Great Indian Bustard was sighted, one newspaper headline screamed
The Great Indian Bastard Sighted
There are some great headlines too. There was this village in Kerala where the villagers unanimously resolved not go to movie theatres. The headline was
Hicks Nix Pix
There are some like this one passed on to me as legendary by a distinguished senior editor, now no more. In fact this gentleman had taunted me when I was a sub (cub) editor to give a catchy headline to the following one line story:-
“A lunatic has sex with a nurse and escapes from the asylum.”
I tried several but none could satisfy him. The catchy one, he said was
Nut Screws, Bolts.
It is a different matter though that one day, actually night, the same gentleman has put a file photograph of late Sanjay Gandhi on the front page instead of Rajiv Gandhi who was on a visit to the state. That too overruling the persistent objections of a junior on the same page duty. I can never forget the face of our executive editor and the chief editor the next morning.
Print Media can be not only informative but also entertaining at times.
