Dammit, Gannett
While your Pesky Fly on the Wall isn’t superstitious by nature, it seems likely that the good people in Iowa who edit (or fail to edit) The Commercial Appeal, are about to be haunted by a very angry ghost with a remarkable gift for creative swearing.
Angus McEachran — the hypothetical ghost here — shuffled off this mortal coil Monday, March 5th.
He was a lifelong newspaperman and lion of Memphis journalism who started out as a copy boy at the CA in 1960 and worked his way to the top editor’s position at The Pittsburgh Press where he led a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning news team.
In 1993, McEachran returned to Memphis to helm the CA, where his intolerance for mistakes was as legendary as his ability to turn reporters into quivering puddles of contrite goo during a process of journalistic atonement called “error court.”
Following his March 5th death, the CA honored its famously meticulous editor by spelling his name wrong in the headline of an otherwise lovely tribute.
At least that was just the early digital version. Surely somebody caught the error and fixed it before it was immortalized in newsprint.
Nope.
