Depending on where you live and how early your newspaper prints, the headlines you read this morning were likely completely different from reality. Most of the daily papers in my area blew it, although at least one went with a more tentative headline that minimized the error.
Thankfully my weekly paper didn't face that issue as we went to press last night; we don't cover national news, unless there's a local face we can put on it.
Nonetheless, the confusion over the mining tragedy is horrifying, and printing such mistaken headlines is sickening for those responsible for them. I worry a great deal about possible mistakes in my paper, and I'm thinking typos or minor errors.
If you look past the wide array of reliable sources that evidently failed reporters on this story, there are some amazing stories of newspapers going all out to get the right story on the streets this morning.
Over at his NewsDesigner.com blog, Mark Friesen details how newspaper covered the disaster. He's got several front pages that got the news wrong, but he's got others -- mostly West Coast -- that got it right. But most interesting are the stories that he relates about newspapers halting the presses to swap out stories and headlines with the tragic news.
Today's "All Things Considered" on NPR also had a story examining the erroneous reporting, with another story of a halted press run. Click here to listen to that story.
Other links:
Newseum: Front pages from papers around the world. Updated daily, so you may need to surf to an archive page to see Wednesday's pages.