This dad's got his own club

Saw a T-shirt at the mall that said the following:

D.A.D.D.
Dad's Against Daughters Dating

The problem is the apostrophe. It means one of two things. It could mean that the word is possessive. But there's nothing for it to possess. So that doesn't make sense. It could mean that the apostrophe stands in for a missing letter. So it could mean "dad is" against daughters dating. That kind of makes sense, if the creator is talking about just one dad. But not if the creator intended "D.A.D.D." to take after MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions).

It should be "Dads Against Daughters Dating." That way, the word "dads" is plural, which means the club can include more than one dad.

Are you sure about that?

Call the ASPCA! In case you can't read the image, the small headline on the left says:

"No one hurt, but family dog is killed."

We're online

My JMC410 class has done some great work so far this semester, and it's online at our class Web site, The 410 Forum. Please check it out.

Another fact not checked

The sports editor at The Star Press in Muncie, Ind., had to apologize in print this week for getting a story completely wrong. Seems a guy by the same name as a local athletic director applied for a job at a different school. Oops. Why did they wait until it was the middle of the night to call the guy for a comment? They'd been chasing the story all day. Unbelievable.

Funniest headlines of all time

These classics remind us that the best "head" writers have the dirtiest minds.

Worth watching

Just finished watching "Control Room," a documentary about Al Jazeera, an Arab-language news outlet. It told the story of the network, as well as the story of how the War in Iraq was managed by the U.S. military. I got the impression that Al Jazeera covered the war better than most of the U.S. news outlets. I highly recommend this movie.

And some sad news. I had forgotten that a correspondent from Al Jazeera was killed when U.S. planes bombed the station's Baghdad offices. It just reminds you of how deadly journalism can be. Very sad.

Did you Chek that?

I love newspapers because they're permanent. A Web site might be edited every five minutes, but a printed newspaper is here to stay. And that's why mistakes in print are so much worse than those online or on video. Of course, they all stink in my book.

One of my former news writing students found this headline, from our local paper, The (Greeley) Tribune. The name of the writer is Anton Chekhov. I know it's a Russian name, and those Russian names are so hard to spell. But that's why we fact check. And when it comes to fact-checking, names are the most important thing to check, or Chekhov, if you will. And fact-checking is rather easy, thanks to the Web. All you have to do is Google the name as you think it's spelled, and Google will come up with the right name. That's what I did for this post. I put in "Checkhov" and Google corrected me.

I guess nobody bothered to tell the editors at The Tribune, because as I write this, four days after publication of the offending headline, the paper's Web site still contains the misspelling.