Publishing on a Shoestring

You can bet that when Brad's Shoes decided to advertise in The New York Times' "Today's Headlines" email blast, it wasn't counting on the subject line being about shoes.

An alert reader who passed this along said the juxtaposition of the ad's shoe image and the "Learning to Kill on a Shoestring" phrase in both the subject line and first headline jumped out at him as soon as he saw the email on his iPhone.

The Times apparently spotted the issue quickly: The email was received at 5:58 a.m. EDT today, but by 6:20 the ad had been removed from the browser-based version of the newsletter.

Fellow publishers, there's a lesson here: Whether it's for print or digital editions, make sure you check for ad/edit conflicts before hitting the "Publish" button.