A typo on the front page of The New York Times went unnoticed for 102 years, with an unknown publisher increasing the issue number by 500 in 1898. A print assistant discovered the mistake in 1999 and it was corrected on January 1, 2000. The correction also revealed that an article celebrating the arrival of issue number 50,000 in 1995 was actually 500 days premature.
Despite false claims that news agencies print and broadcast “fake news,” journalists around the world diligently try to correct every published error. But one typo survived unnoticed for 102 years on the front page of the venerable New York Times.
The typo first appeared on the front page of the February 7, 1898 edition of The Times. The night before that issue was published, an unknown publisher made a mathematical error, increasing the 14,499 issue from February 6 to 15,000 on February 7. In the confusion, 500 issues disappeared overnight and no one caught the mistake for over a century – until a print assistant did some research in December 1999 and discovered the problem. On January 1, 2000, The Times corrected the error and published a correction.
Tracing the typo:
Manually updating the issue number every day was a recipe for disaster, the 24-year-old journalist assistant had told her editors. So he sifted through thousands of archival issues and finally found the gaffe.
In its New Year’s issue, the Times reported, in part: “The 500-digit error persisted until yesterday (#51,753) … today the Times is turning back the clock to correct the sequence: This problem is #51,753. 51.254.”
Though embarrassing at times, newspapers always try to correct mistakes. That day’s correction included the awareness that “an article dated March 14, 1995, celebrating the arrival of the n. 50,000, was 500 days premature. It should have appeared on July 26, 1996.”
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