This was on the front page of cnn.com:
Here is the link to the game story about No. 18 Tennessee and UCLA.
A quick glimpse of the boxscore at the stop of the page clearly shows that the headline is wrong. UCLA actually defeated the Vols in overtime which is evident in the first paragraph and a half in the story. This is a major gaff for a mainstream Web site, and it has not been corrected hours since the game concluded and the story posted (as of 2 a.m. CT).
Another story relating to the Vols-Bruins football game dealt with UCLA's head coach Rick Neuheisel. The headline on the front page of msn.foxsports.com read: Upset win was a microcosm of Neuheisel's career. Now when reading the headline, it appears the story will be about an important victory during the head coach's playing career or maybe even his coaching career prior to his arrival at UCLA. That may be correct. Too bad none of the possibly relevent information appeared until the last 1/4 of the story. Since Neuheisel is still coaching, I would assume when the word career is used in the headline, it refers to his days as a football player, not as a coach as well as a monumental victory he was involved in. This is the story's lede.
"Rick Neuheisel's been here before, both literally and figuratively. The Rose Bowl has been the site of some of Neuheisel's greatest moments, as a coach and a player. He won the Rose Bowl as the coach of Washington in 2001, and as a quarterback for UCLA in 1984."Those supposed greatest moments were never expanded upon. And then the next mention relating to the positive aspects to his career, player or otherwise, as the headline indicates was literally five paragraphs from the end of the story.
"A former walk-on, Neuheisel opened his senior season with an 0-2-1 mark at the helm of the Bruins, lost the starting job, but got it back two weeks later due to injury and led UCLA to a 6-4-1 mark that included a win over USC and the lopsided Rose Bowl win over Illinois."After reading the story in its entirety, it is really about Neuheisel attempting to resurrect the UCLA football program as he moves on from his checkered coaching past. I'm still not sure what upset win they are referring to, unless it is in reference to the Sept. 1 win against the No. 18 Vols. If that is the case, only a simple change is needed. The headline, and thus a better understanding of the story, could be fixed just by simply changing the word "was" to the word "is" so it reads: Upset win is a microcosm of Nueheisel's career.
This is a headline on the Washington Post Web site: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Edwin O. Guthman, 89. Granted when you actually click on the story, there is an obituary tag, however, the headline on the front page of Google News reads as such. While I may be able to infer that this man has passed away, the headline is pretty iffy and considering he won a Pulitzer, there could be a better way to sum up his life or his death.
4 comments:
I'm glad you pointed this out. Headlines are an essential part in grabbing the reader's attention. I think this is especially important on Web sites, where the reader has a lot of other things he or she can look at on the same page.
On the page for the "No. 18 Vols survive scare for UCLA" story, it had the top 25 scores of the day, a box score of the Tennessee vs. UCLA game, advertisements and links to other information. The headline needs to be catchy and accurate to draw readers into the story.
I was surprised to find out that a big news source such as CNN had that kind of mistake. If you look at the box score at the top of the page or the second sentence in the story, the copy editor should have seen that UCLA won.
I looked on its site at noon Tuesday and found that CNN's second day story fixed the headline problem. The headline for the follow up story was "Craft rebounds from rough start as UCLA knocks off No. 18 Tennessee."
At some point, CNN changed the headline on the original story too. It now says "UCLA upsets Tennessee in overtime thriller."
I think CNN did a good job by correcting the error, but it's unfortunate that the mistake occurred in the first place.
Was the correction pointed out as a correction or was the mistake fixed with no comment?
The correction was fixed with no comment.
About the obituary, I would be upset if a friend or family member had that type of headline to commemorate his/her death.
It seems rather comical that someone who won a Pulitzer Prize--something associated with writing--would have such a botched headline in his death notice. And comical that the headline is wrong, not comical he died!
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