In a few papers this morning there was a white box on top of a photograph on Page 1C. Here’s what happened.
When a story is longer than the space we have, the page designer will put the excess sentences, called slop, in a white box somewhere on the page. This lets copy editors know how much of the story needs trimming. Last night, after the story was edited down, the box wasn’t removed.
We saw the box as soon as the presses started and rushed the corrected page through, trying to get it in as many papers as we could.
We’re working on fixes for our system and will do all we can to keep this from happening in the future.