Juxtaposition happens! Let’s hope for the Sun’s sake this salesman has a sense of humour

Juxtaposition happens!

And usually, when it does, something else flows downhill from there. Bet that the latter material was flowing downhill onto the head of some poor copy editor at the Edmonton Sun not so long ago.

I’m speculating, of course. I have no insider knowledge. I just opened the pages of Sunday’s Sun to see this:

Whoops! Bad juxtaposition! Let’s hope for the Sun’s sake that the car salesman in question has a sense of humour.

Having spent many years working for metropolitan daily newspapers, I can tell you that this kind of thing used to happen with astonishing ease. The business is rife with stories of plane crash stories placed beside have-a-wonderful-flight advertisements, followed by terrifying calls from the advertisers to the publisher, and so on down the chain. For some reason, it’s always an anonymous sluggo on the copy desk who ends up wearing it.

The reason is that the ads are placed in the paper first. How many pages there will be, and what they will look like, are decisions based on the number of advertisements that have been sold. When the page gets to the copy editor (in the old days on a piece of paper called a dummy, nowadays as an electronic file) the image on the ad doesn’t show up. Probably the only thing the editor could see was a label that said something like “Car Dealer Ad.”

For a few years, this particular problem happened less often. Newspapers took measures to prevent it. Usually that meant a person walking around the pre-press area eyeballing the pages for just this kind of thing.

Apparently in this era of short staffing, no-staffing and commuting editors responsible for the contents of different newspapers in different cities, that person’s been sent packing while no one else is paying attention. The results, of course, are predictable.

Indeed, one wonders if similar care was taken with the facts in the story.

Regardless, here’s some advice: Someone from the Sun should probably be calling up Andre and saying, uh, sorry! Maybe send him tickets to an Oilers game or something. … No, on second thought, probably not that…

How about a fruit basket? Yeah, that’s it! Fruit baskets are always good! If there’s room in the budget…