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.
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.
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.
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.
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.