A knee-slapper

Well, whaddya know, here's another case of dummy type making it on the Web -- this time on the Web site of the Danbury, Conn., News-Times:

The Immaculate High School girls' team was celebrating a goal scored in a championship-clinching win Nov. 5. The newspaper's Web site published a photograph of the jubilant team, but said it was celebrating a teammate's decision to "come out of the closet as a lesbian."

Who was responsible? Oh, you know it: a funny copy editor. The paper's editor said the copy editor was just "goofing around" and didn't know the caption had made it online.

"It was a flagrant, awful violation of every journalistic principle," said Paul Steinmetz, the paper's editor. "It's just embarrassing to us and untenable."

UPDATE: The copy editor was fired. And at Visual Editors, someone posted a note from her managing editor in Lewiston, Maine, who said he had worked with the guy before:

"To make it worse, years ago I supervised this guy in Connecticut, warned him more than once that he was risking his job by fooling around. He was immensely talented and a hard worker, but he thought he could always walk on the edge without falling off. Now he's fallen off, and I doubt he'll ever be able to regain his balance on a newspaper."