It’s not exactly “Dewey defeats Truman,” but the cover of Thursday’s Express, The Washington Post’s free publication, is a doozy.
The cover, which leads with the origins of this year’s Women’s March on Washington, shows people scattered into a well-known symbol. The problem? It’s the wrong symbol.
Mid-morning Thursday, Express tweeted an apology:
We made a mistake on our cover this morning and we’re very embarrassed. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol.
— Express (@WaPoExpress) January 5, 2017
And quickly after that, an image of how the cover should have appeared:
This is how the cover should have looked. We apologize for the mistake. pic.twitter.com/MKKOkHPV8T
— Express (@WaPoExpress) January 5, 2017
Poynter asked the Post for more information about the episode — how it happened, whether any women were involved in the cover’s production and how Express decided to Post the correction. A spokesperson for the Post said the newspaper had no details to share beyond the correction.
The Post was written up this week by its own media reporter, Erik Wemple, after declining to talk about errors in another recent story.
Poynter’s Alexios Mantzarlis thinks today’s cover may already be this year’s best correction. (We’re still talking about investafarted.)
Kristen Hare covers the media for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa.
