The backdrop for this post is snowy Cleveland, where I spent eight of my 20 years working in the commercial newswire business.  A short return visit this week to the Midwest — including stops in Chicago and Minneapolis — brought back a flood of memories that included many victories and a few business SNAFUs.

In the late ’80s, when spell check consisted of a well-worn dictionary sitting next to the editorial desk, we relied on eagle-eyed editors reading each press release aloud to a colleague before hitting the SEND button and distributing the copy to media across the nation.

Our earliest word processing programs –  like Xywrite,  Word Perfect and later, Word — helped catch many typos, thanks to internal dictionaries.  But, as former colleagues and competitors reminded me on my Midwest newswire reunion tour, spell check didn’t stop these doozies:

• In the personnel release announcing my appointment to PR Newswire, I was described as a veteran pubic relations executive.
• A release concerning a sensitive restructuring release for a leading carrier referred to the company as Untied Airlines.
• The surname of John Balch, CEO of vacuum cleaner maker Royal Apppliance, became Belch.
• A big box electronics retailer was rebranded as Best But
• The first name of Goldman Sachs went out as Goddamn

As I looked out my hotel window at the snowy streets of Cleveland and the gathering storm clouds over Lake Erie, I flashed back to those unpleasant phone calls with corp comm execs who rarely knew about the typos until we shared the bad news.  And the worst was yet to come.  After hanging up the phone, we inevitably transmitted a correction that called attention to our mistake and inspired guffaws among those reading the wire in newsrooms and brokerage houses.  The business relationships rarely survived those incidents.

So what’s the current state of affairs in the commercial newswire industry?  A quick search of “manger” revealed numerous instances of a livestock pen being substituted for the word “manager.”   My old favorite “pubic” also gets plenty of play, including a recent Oracle release.

I am leaving my hotel happy that I don’t have to call Larry Ellison’s PR team to grovel.