‘Positive’ Magazine Shelved Over Misspellings

First issue of Cook County printed but won’t be distributed.

By Jason Fell
07/28/2008 -15:24 PM

Alright, try to follow this insanity.

Cook County magazine, what was supposed to be a new title commissioned by Cook County, Illinois board president Todd Stroger, has been shelved due—of all things—to misspellings and grammatical errors.

According to a report in Chicago’s Sun-Times, Stroger hired an editor to develop and publish a magazine in a “non-threatening news environment that ensures regular, positive press—to counter-balance negative press often found in the mainstream media.” Today, though, 5,000 copies of the 32-page glossy are stacked in Stroger’s office with no place to go. The cover story of the launch issue is an interview with Stroger that apparently contains a number of misspellings and omissions.

“I was asked to review [the magazine] and decided not to distribute it—not because of content, but errors and omissions in the article,” a spokesperson for Stroger said in the report. “Judging on grammatical stuff—something misspelled or that’s not a complete sentence—falls back on the president. And this is a Cook County magazine. I have to find a way to get rid of [the issues]. I’m not distributing them.”

I haven’t seen a copy of the magazine myself but, I mean—wow. What a wasted effort. What a waste of paper.

You’d think if you’d go to the trouble of launching a mouthpiece magazine you’d at least use spell check.