So good -- I remember seeing one in the NYT when the George Zimmerman jury verdict was reached, that was just a XX/XX/XXXX in the date section. Assuming they had both articles written.
I suspect this will only become more and more common in the "publish first, edit later" evolving world of online journalism.
The other way to look at it is that it is the logical way to go about optimizing delivery times. Parallelize everything you can. I don't see why people are shitting on it, it's not like you'll wait for the designer to pretty up your web app before you can implement the functionality you want.
It is known that news organizations already have obits for prominent figures written and ready to be published at a moment's notice. CNN accidentally exposed some of these in 2003.
It's been standard practice since long before the Web to have pre-written obituaries for high profile people (politicians, royals, the Pope, etc.) and to update them periodically. When someone of this stature dies, the newspapers will have multiple pages of content ready to roll-out with minimal editing.
Some people once found a bunch of work-in-progress obits on CNN's website:
Premise is silly. You want deadline-based newspaper designers to WAIT until all the stories and headlines are done - then design the paper. And get a paper out? I take it you internet junkies know nothing of the once enormous scope of journalism and the resource allocation necessary to accomplish it. Let me explain parallel process project management to you someday.
Papers are quite capable of doing this sort of thing without deadline pressure. The Mirror, for example, once announced to the world that "Monty Flies Back to Front" (1942), and in 1952 told their readers that "Sir Vivienne Fuchs Off To North Pole".
Dunno if smartphones are really in the picture (yet), but between competing with TV for ad dollars and Craigslist for classified ads, they are in a tough spot.
Also, it’s not important. Stuff like that happens, but it happens rarely. Most of time it works and if it doesn’t it usually isn’t a problem. So sometimes there’s silly placeholder text. Who cares?
This is not a fundamental problem that needs to be solved. Sure, it’s easy to develop some better guidelines on how to handle this (e.g. guidelines that make sure potentially insulting language is never used and make all placeholders easier to find in an automated way) but that’s about it. There is no need to fundamentally change how production works to solve this.
Recently I've started censoring myself with log message even if I know they can't survive for more than one page refresh. It's tempting to take out some frustration with a "console.log("fuuuuuuuuuu!")" but in the end it's not worth those verrry rare events when you're accidentally insulting a customer.
An ATM I use frequently hasn't been properly set up, so during the transaction, you'll see things like "[CONSUMER MESSAGE]" and "[NON-MEMBER FEE]" and "[EXIT MESSAGE HERE]". Makes me smile every time.
It's funny but I think that's the way to go if you can't get your content first, if something slips through, it might be weird to the customer, but not insulting.
In this case it's designed this way because the ATM vendor is not the same company as the bank that owns/runs the ATM. The bank will want to put different text depending on the locale, default language, their own bank marketing jargon, etc. This is a perfect example where design should come before copy.
One of the software products I worked on once forgot to take out test data from their reports. We got a support ticket asking what the report "I can hear angels" did.
One of the very best one I've seen back when I was working in the book publishing business (many moons ago) was this: a bogus screenshot (totally unrelated to the book) with a legend saying something like this: "Insert something similar to what's in book X at page 237"... With "book X" being the name of a book by a competitor.
Somehow everybody (proofreader(s), author(s), etc.) ended missing that and the bogus screenshot and that legend made it to the final, printed, version of the book : )
That's why I always use "_X_" as placeholder text. At the very end of development I run a search for "_X_" on the templates/files to see if I accidentally left any. Not only does it stand out visually but it's very easy to run a search on without any false positives.
Someone I used to work with once left a alert('W.A.N.K') in the codebase. This was in a fairly rarely occurring branch of code and made it all the way to production.
I've taken that as a warning and never write anything I wouldn't be happy for a customer to see in logs, test-data, comments (although handfuls of sarcasm are still acceptable) or debugging code.
I've taken that as a warning and never write anything I wouldn't be happy for a customer to see in logs, test-data, comments (although handfuls of sarcasm are still acceptable) or debugging code.
Very good advice!
I once worked with someone who had the unfortunate habit of naming debugging log files "shit".
After a server migration, a couple of paths had been incorrectly set, leading to the client complaining about a now-memorable error: "Cannot open: shit".
I was officially forbidden in my old job to write error messages at 3AM. Code was ok. But text - not after а high ranking client saw an error message. Its good that during the meetings with him we both were (in)appropriately vulgar and offensive so only my manager was shocked.
I worked on some software that automatically generated documentation for engineers. During testing someone put "hello fuckers" in the code so that he could easily see when it came out the other end.
Naturally that code was left in and went into production, and the customer rings up to complain they'd just printed out a 2000 page manual with "hello fuckers" at the end of every line.
I've never seen a manager look so furious, but we were all paid so little we just laughed.
This. I didn't even need to learn this the hard way, just had to read back some of my earliest teenage code (obviously not for any type of "production" setting) and hear enough of these scary stories to decide once and for all, it's really not that hard or big of a deal to be professional about these kinds of things.
Same goes for code comments. Unless it's a really, really good joke that won't offend if it happens to show up anywhere, or over your shoulder.
It's a testament to how much more software we could stand to develop, software that probably hasn't even been touched, yet.
For a newspaper, obviously they need to have a parallel process to layout the paper and develop the content. Why don't they have software now that "compiles" the paper from design files and content files and won't release the copy until all of the content is marked as reviewed?
Or essentially, as the person is performing the layout for stuff like callouts, instead of generating their own placeholder content, they generate rules for the place holder content (just as they seem to be typing rules into the callout as the placeholder itself), and the system would both generate the placeholder for the designer, while also queuing the snippet of content for the writer.
Then, you just have to train your users "never type in your own placeholder text." Use the queue as a project management tool. Editors could then review the text, mark it as reviewed, or re-enqueue it for rewriting. The article is done when the queue is done.
I mean, really, I'm not even describing anything revolutionary here. It's BugZilla, Redmine, etc., just with a layout program tied to the fields in the database.
Would newspapers and magazines actually use something like that? Or is pigheaded entrenchment into old ways the disease of their industry that is leading them to die out?
> Once integrated, writers, editors and designers can simultaneously work on the same page; the designer creates the page layout with InDesign, while editors simultaneously edit different stories with InCopy, via the Adobe LiveEdit rights management system.
I recall there's at least one other product for similar kind of workflow (not tied to Adobe ecosystem), but being no longer in the industry I forgot the name.
So is the software any good? Why wouldn't something of such obvious utility take over? I have seen plenty of cases where users will circumvent a system they are given if it is difficult to use or they don't understand it.
I know of one example where this kind of integration is actually in place and properly utilized. It's a pretty big newspaper. The integration is provided by a publishing system called K4.
Admittedly, very few publications would employ similar systems here. Because they're complex to set up, expensive, and not easy to pirate (I don't think many small publications paid for their copies of InDesign/PageMaker), because there's inertia and fear of losing their jobs among the staff (not many young forward-thinking professionals in print nowadays), etc. Not sure how things are US, though.
It would have helped stop the headline "Can Dec anally match Ant?" in the Daily Express. This was credited as "Accidental headline of the year" by the Guardian.
Humans make mistakes and I'm glad we have those placeholders creating funny situations.
However I don't put anything in my comments / code that would reflect poorly on me or my company. A bit of humor is always refreshing, but vulgarity is a no no.
Insults is definitely a bad idea but think that dummy content is unwise in general. In my experience, actual content almost always makes the design look different from dummy content.
Stopping for 30 seconds to come up with subpar copy is usually worth it vs using some sort of placeholder that you need to come back and fix later. When I know the copy is awful and that I need to come back and replace it, I put in a comment that says
# COPY_REQUIRED
As long as I'm consistent about the tag that I use, I can easily search my project for my tags and fix before launch.
Similarly, I do a fair amount of presentations, and I always put in huge red letters a note to update the metrics, provide a source, etc. It's hard to miss when doing a final flip-through.
When writing papers in grad school, we'd leave placeholders in all the time, but always prefixed with the string "ZZZ", so they'd be really easy to search for.
You're missing the call to action, fellow peeps. The problem isn't that the text went out with stubs - it's that the products and articles were designed without any clue to what the content was.
I was an editor of a small print publication and this happened to me once. The caption below a photo was something like "Please tell me this isn't a stupid picture of XYZ" (can't remember what it was) as a joke to the copy editor who would eventually see it an laugh at how hilarious I was. Of course it slipped by because it just looked like a normal caption.
I'm not sure these examples advance this article's point too far-- incidents like these could have been avoided by more clearly marking that the text was a placeholder.
I may be an idiot, but I feel like I need to get a bottle of that to keep on my desk. But googling it only seems to reveal a different style of label. [1][2] Have I got the search right? You didn't happen to buy it online?
I worked at a place (but not on the team) where someone used the Ebonics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...) version of Lorem Ipsum to fill in a large amount of text on the app. They forgot about it and showed it to the client and it contained a lot f-bombs and n-words.
It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it's there, it'll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.
Such an instance lead to a libel lawsuit at Virginia Tech in 1996 when the student paper left "director of butt licking" as the title for an administrator in a pulled quote.
We had a very funny example of this at my school paper. Our football team was one game away from a winless season, and many people were demanding that the head coach be fired for this terrible performance[0].
As a joke, someone referred to Coach Wilson on a pull quote as "head coach of the Columbia football team until Monday morning". This was supposed to be removed before print, but nobody caught it.
To make matters worse, the coach actually was fired that weekend (not even 24 hours after the team had its only win of the season)! That led to an incredibly awkward retraction: ("This was a joke, and we're sorry... but apparently we were right, even though we didn't know it"[1])
This sort of stuff goes on in newsrooms all the time. I'm actually surprised that these mistakes don't happen more often, given how common these are, and given that most copy-editing happens in the wee hours of the morning, fueled by caffeine and sleep deprivation.
[1] I was on the board of the paper at the time, so I can confirm that we actually didn't have prior knowledge of this - it really was just a very amusingly-timed joke.
It goes on in student newsrooms all the time, but the only time I've ever seen it in real newsrooms is from recently hired students.
It's much too easy a mistake to make, and in some places using "real" text is a discipline offence, so it's much more common to see "cgclcgl" or "hdyhdyhdy" or "123123" or eye-catching text like that. (Lorem Ipsum doesn't leap out at the eye enough).
I once wrote a headline about an invasion of a new breed of octopuses coming to our waters, along the lines of:
"Indian Octopus
Heading Here"
but seeing it on proofs freaked everyone out too much and it had to be changed.
It definitely does happen in newsrooms of journals of record as well. I'm not going to call any out by name, because I know it's very common. They're just generally better about catching it.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the name of a website that reported on the God’s Only Demons Motorcycle Club. It is DNAinfo, not DNAdisinfo.
Why doesn't print software include a "placeholder" text formatting function? You highlight some text and mark it as placeholder. You can toggle on highlighting when you want to find it to replace, or toggle off to see what it looks like as a final piece. It could also auto-generate lipsum for you. Also, before you publish it, it'll warn you if you have any placeholder text left.
I found Lorem Ipsum on the side of a Chipotle bag not too long ago. I thought it had to have been satire, but now I realize that it's just incompetence.
It's hand-drawn. It's not something that someone was going to type over later.
Chipotle bags have all kinds of different wacky, rambly messages written on them. It would not at all be out of place for them to say "hey, let's just throw in a Lorem Ipsum, then a few design nerds will be amused by the bag".
This is a reminder to all the junior developers (and some of the forgetful senior developers) as to why you never put anything in testing text that you don't want the world to see. Having users see "Fucking FuckBalls" as placeholder instead of "John Doe" is alarming and will lead to quite the awkward discussion with your boss.
102 comments
[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadI suspect this will only become more and more common in the "publish first, edit later" evolving world of online journalism.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cnn-chagrined-over-premature-obi...
Some people once found a bunch of work-in-progress obits on CNN's website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_obituaries#Th...
And the BBC had a 30 min comedy about an obit writer who saved their job by murdering high-profile individuals:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0653345/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhwiuRbOEE
This is not a fundamental problem that needs to be solved. Sure, it’s easy to develop some better guidelines on how to handle this (e.g. guidelines that make sure potentially insulting language is never used and make all placeholders easier to find in an automated way) but that’s about it. There is no need to fundamentally change how production works to solve this.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/14082734075741798...
Somehow everybody (proofreader(s), author(s), etc.) ended missing that and the bogus screenshot and that legend made it to the final, printed, version of the book : )
Fortunately the text was bilingual and I doubt there are many Welsh who don't speak English...
I've taken that as a warning and never write anything I wouldn't be happy for a customer to see in logs, test-data, comments (although handfuls of sarcasm are still acceptable) or debugging code.
Very good advice!
I once worked with someone who had the unfortunate habit of naming debugging log files "shit".
After a server migration, a couple of paths had been incorrectly set, leading to the client complaining about a now-memorable error: "Cannot open: shit".
Whoops
I'm adopting this error message for I/O from now on.
Naturally that code was left in and went into production, and the customer rings up to complain they'd just printed out a 2000 page manual with "hello fuckers" at the end of every line.
I've never seen a manager look so furious, but we were all paid so little we just laughed.
that summarizes the whole thread.
Same goes for code comments. Unless it's a really, really good joke that won't offend if it happens to show up anywhere, or over your shoulder.
For a newspaper, obviously they need to have a parallel process to layout the paper and develop the content. Why don't they have software now that "compiles" the paper from design files and content files and won't release the copy until all of the content is marked as reviewed?
Or essentially, as the person is performing the layout for stuff like callouts, instead of generating their own placeholder content, they generate rules for the place holder content (just as they seem to be typing rules into the callout as the placeholder itself), and the system would both generate the placeholder for the designer, while also queuing the snippet of content for the writer.
Then, you just have to train your users "never type in your own placeholder text." Use the queue as a project management tool. Editors could then review the text, mark it as reviewed, or re-enqueue it for rewriting. The article is done when the queue is done.
I mean, really, I'm not even describing anything revolutionary here. It's BugZilla, Redmine, etc., just with a layout program tied to the fields in the database.
Would newspapers and magazines actually use something like that? Or is pigheaded entrenchment into old ways the disease of their industry that is leading them to die out?
> Once integrated, writers, editors and designers can simultaneously work on the same page; the designer creates the page layout with InDesign, while editors simultaneously edit different stories with InCopy, via the Adobe LiveEdit rights management system.
I recall there's at least one other product for similar kind of workflow (not tied to Adobe ecosystem), but being no longer in the industry I forgot the name.
Admittedly, very few publications would employ similar systems here. Because they're complex to set up, expensive, and not easy to pirate (I don't think many small publications paid for their copies of InDesign/PageMaker), because there's inertia and fear of losing their jobs among the staff (not many young forward-thinking professionals in print nowadays), etc. Not sure how things are US, though.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2009/sep/01...
However I don't put anything in my comments / code that would reflect poorly on me or my company. A bit of humor is always refreshing, but vulgarity is a no no.
Similarly, I do a fair amount of presentations, and I always put in huge red letters a note to update the metrics, provide a source, etc. It's hard to miss when doing a final flip-through.
Content first, then design to match the content.
I'm not sure these examples advance this article's point too far-- incidents like these could have been avoided by more clearly marking that the text was a placeholder.
"Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis…"
Here is a link the supplementary information where the quote is located on page 12. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/om4000067/suppl_file/o...
https://mobile.twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/14082734075741798...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=2009+Roland+Tissier+Sancerre...
[2] http://bestbuyliquors.com/roland-tissier-fils-sancerre-2009....
Edit: looks like different labels for US and UK? Oh well. :( [3]
[3] http://www.colombierwines.co.uk/products/Sancerre-Rouge%2C-D...
OK, enough wasting of time...
It seems like people need to learn the hard way to not put that stuff in. If it's there, it'll be accidentally shown to the wrong person.
Yeah, calling that "Ebonics" is being too charitable.
Took me a while to find too.
Article from '96 on the filing: http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=41&edition=16
Article from '97 when the judge dismissed the case as it was "not defamatory": http://www.splc.org/news/report_detail.asp?id=136&edition=14
As a joke, someone referred to Coach Wilson on a pull quote as "head coach of the Columbia football team until Monday morning". This was supposed to be removed before print, but nobody caught it.
To make matters worse, the coach actually was fired that weekend (not even 24 hours after the team had its only win of the season)! That led to an incredibly awkward retraction: ("This was a joke, and we're sorry... but apparently we were right, even though we didn't know it"[1])
This sort of stuff goes on in newsrooms all the time. I'm actually surprised that these mistakes don't happen more often, given how common these are, and given that most copy-editing happens in the wee hours of the morning, fueled by caffeine and sleep deprivation.
[0] Don't have time to scan through the PDFs of the printed versions (IIRC it was only in the printed version), but it was one of these articles: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/tags/norries-wilson
[1] I was on the board of the paper at the time, so I can confirm that we actually didn't have prior knowledge of this - it really was just a very amusingly-timed joke.
It's much too easy a mistake to make, and in some places using "real" text is a discipline offence, so it's much more common to see "cgclcgl" or "hdyhdyhdy" or "123123" or eye-catching text like that. (Lorem Ipsum doesn't leap out at the eye enough).
I once wrote a headline about an invasion of a new breed of octopuses coming to our waters, along the lines of:
"Indian Octopus
Heading Here"
but seeing it on proofs freaked everyone out too much and it had to be changed.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the name of a website that reported on the God’s Only Demons Motorcycle Club. It is DNAinfo, not DNAdisinfo.
And that's the New York Times.
Pic: http://twitpic.com/37g3li
It's hand-drawn. It's not something that someone was going to type over later.
Chipotle bags have all kinds of different wacky, rambly messages written on them. It would not at all be out of place for them to say "hey, let's just throw in a Lorem Ipsum, then a few design nerds will be amused by the bag".