How Not To Keep Your Small Paper Job

For a year and a half, back in the nineties, we worked on the online copy desk for a sports magazine, on the late-night shift. A large part of this job involved being the only person in the office at 1:30 in the morning, waiting for an interminable Padres-Pirates game to end, playing Minesweeper and refreshing the AP wire to see if the final game story had come through so we could paste it onto the Web and then go home. It was a job of much boredom, and we would do whatever we could to make it more interesting. Most of this involved writing double entendre headlines, just to see if our boss would find them and change them the next morning. He never did.

So we understood and sympathized this morning when we read the story of the Danbury News-Times Web copy editor who was fired last week for writing, under the caption of a celebrating high school girl's soccer team, that the team was cheering because one of its players had decided to "come out of the closet as a lesbian." (Oh, come on, he had a 25 percent chance of being right.)

The paper says the unidentified copy editor was "goofing around" and didn't realize the caption had gone live. This explains all our posts so far this morning too.

Anybody know the guy this happened to? We'd be happy to help him out, let him explain his side of the story. Any clues, let us know at [email protected]. We understand his pain.

'Goofing Around' Gaffe Gets News Editor Fired [WCBS]