Julie Amero: “Porn-loving teacher?!!”

Writing for a newswire service, I see the headlines I write get changed all the time. It’s a good thing. I’m a crappy headline writer, and the editors here at IDG almost always improve on what I’ve submitted.

But sometimes a rewritten headline is not better. In fact, sometimes it’s a disaster.

That’s what happened with this AP headline about the Julie Amero case, rewritten by somebody at KTVO-TV, a broadcaster with studios in Iowa and Missouri.

Now it’s true that putting the word “porn” in a headline usually doubles your pageviews, but the KTVO editors clearly went off the deep end here, changing the AP’s “Teacher gets new trial on classroom porn” into “Porn loving teacher to get new trial.” (You can see an image of the original headline on the Sunbelt Software blog.)

As anyone familiar with the case will tell you, Julie Amero is not a “porn-loving” teacher. She’s more of a poster-child for the dangers of spyware, which caused unwanted pornography to pop-up on a classroom computer while she was teaching.

The original story was off the KTVO Web site this morning, but it looks like they’ve put up a new version with a better headline. What a goof-up. I wonder how much nasty e-mail they received?