News-Record.com

This is one of the things I worry about: mock story written for a departing staff member's going away party gets into print or pixels. In this case, a satirical farewell speech from a copy editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press was published on the paper's Web site.

Eventually someone got fired over it. (Thanks to Pam at Words at Work for the tip.)

It's a widespread newsroom tradition: departing employees get a mock front page that makes fun of them and some of the stories they've written and people they've covered. We have the same tradition.

Because newsrooms tend to attract some outsized, creative and occasionally dysfunctional personalities, we've had some pretty wild, creative and occasionally inappropriate pages. Some have been inappropriate enough that I have seen the need to tell the person in charge of our copy desk -- the people who are the ultimate safety net in a newsroom -- to make sure that the wrong photo or wrong batch of copy doesn't find its way into print. They look at me as if I'm an idiot, which is the correct response. (I'm pretty confident one of the eagle-eyed pressmen would catch if it slipped through to the press.)

Would I fire someone over it? It depends what happened, but I wouldn't be inclined to go that far.

Would I stop the tradition? No way. I still have mine from the day I left the News & Observer 20+ years ago. (It features a photo of me and Pope John Paul II. You had to be there.)