Colts Win Super Bowl, According to Virginia-Pilot

This probably won't help the perception that newspapers are on the death march, each irrevocable step drawing the industry that much closer to the end.

The upside: Peyton Manning has been vindicated, his legacy intact.

The front page of Monday's edition of the Virginia-Pilot declared the Colts 31-17 winners over the Saints. There's more: the mistake was repeated on Page 9. So how does this happen?

In Tuesday's paper, Pilot editor Denis Finley tries to explain.

It doesn't get much worse. The whole country watches the Super Bowl, the whole country knows the score, and we get it wrong? Preposterous. Unbelievable. Embarrassing.

How could this happen? ... It was, as simply as I can put it, human error. It's hard to believe we can make a mistake like this when at least a half-dozen veteran journalists were involved in producing Monday's Sports section. It's hard to believe we can mess up what is arguably the biggest sporting event of the year, but we did.

I completely agree with Finley -- when you're writing and editing thousands of words a day, mistakes are missed. In fact, without much effort you can probably find grammatical errors in this post. The difference is that I can make the change in a few seconds, issue a quick "Hey, I messed up, it's fixed now" update and we can all get on with our lives.

Once the paper is delivered, there's not much Finley or anybody else can do about it. Hence the apology. The real problem, however, wasn't the front-page mistake, but this:

To our loyal readers and sports fans, I apologize. To the New Orleans Saints fans who might have wanted a keepsake edition of The Pilot, I apologize. We did remake the page for those who want to buy a Sports front suitable for framing. Just go here to order it. This is not a reprint of the actual newspaper. It's too late to print that. It's a glossy poster of the Sports front only, just like the other front pages we typically sell after they are published.

Oh, and that glossy poster correctly identifying the Saints as champs? That'll run you anywhere from $39.95 (unframed 11x14) to $109.95 (framed, 12x21). Surprisingly, that didn't go over well with some subscribers.

Silver lining: Peyton now has two Super Bowl rings, just one behind archnemesis Tom Brady.