39
I just changed the lead headline at The Guardian
(beehaw.org)
Nothing huge ... just removing an "n" that made it incorrect. I emailed because it was a bit embarrassing.
But I literally changed an international publication. Not since I changed A1 on The Washington Post as a bystander in 2003 have I felt this.
Not to be "that guy," but are you talking masthead or nameplate? There seems to be some confusion among people without journalism experience about the meaning.
The nameplate is on A1 and fixed art -- generally a PDF but used to be TIFFs. The masthead (a list of senior staff, usually comprising the editorial board) runs on the editorial page and is on the template, so I can't see how either of these things could lead to misspellings.
Granted, I didn't start until the '90s, so we were well past Linotype but not quite to direct-to-plate. Manual typesetting in the '70s could of course lead to this problem.
The world needs more “those guys”, especially when they actually know what they’re talking about.
I was only quoting the explanation, but as far as I can tell, part of the joke is that the paper was so regularly riddled with typesetting and spelling errors that The Guardian could make an error with an unchanging block that should be almost impossible to get wrong without deliberate effort.
As to whether they meant the nameplate or the masthead, this is a distinction I’d never heard about before, so I’ve learnt something there!