Interesting article ...

Newsweek recalls 125,000 copies of special 'Madam President' edition

NEWSWEEK/TWITTER

 Oops - Newsweek is recalling 125,000 versions of a special edition that reported a Hillary Clinton win in the US presidential election.

US magazine Newsweek has recalled 125,000 copies of a special "Madam President" commemorative issue that it had shipped to stores across America.

In its place, Newsweek is rushing out a special edition reporting Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election.

The commemorative editions came from Newsweek partner Topix Media, which produces special editions of the magazine.

In standard journalistic practice, editions reporting both a win by Trump and a win by Hillary Clinton were designed and laid out in advance.

Believing Clinton would win, Topix shipped only the Clinton issue.

"Like everybody else, we got it wrong," Topix chief executive Tony Romando told the New York Post. 

Retailers were told not to put the issue on sale before the election but a handful did, and 17 of the Clinton magazines were sold. Wholesalers and retailers had been asked to return remaining issues.

Romando is printing 150,000 copies of the Trump edition, more than of the Clinton edition "as there is obviously a great demand".

The incident is reminiscent of the famous 1948 "Dewey Defeats Truman" front page published by the Chicago Daily Tribune newspaper, incorrectly reporting their favoured candidate Republican challenger Thomas E Dewey had beaten incumbent President Harry S Truman.

Newsweek's overconfidence has similarities to the Chicago Daily Tribune's famous failed presidential prediction of 1948. At least Truman thought that was funny.

One article in the New York Times has even called the whole 2016 presidential election "A Dewey Defeats Truman Lesson for the Digital Age".

"All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modelling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavour of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country," the Times said.

"The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media."