In my many years as a freelance journalist I have experienced several printing errors that have appeared in articles I've written for newspapers.
Aside from the occasional misspelled word or factual error, or God forbid, the complete rewriting of an article by an imperious editor, I have experienced such mishaps as a mangled or missing byline, jumbled paragraphs (something that happened in a syndicated article I wrote about Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie), and the use of my words about the famed Cotton Club in someone else's article without attribution (otherwise known as plagiarism). The latter mishap would have been hard for me to prove since the offending party would probably claim that the lack of attribution was a printer's error and not a deliberate theft from my syndicated article.
But the one thing that has not happened to me, and I pray it never does, is something I saw while going through an old issue of one of New York's daily newspapers. The whole bottom half of the page was so ink smeared, it was impossible to read what was printed. I felt sorry for the writers to whom this happened. I can only hope that the paper corrected the problem in later editions.
