Newsrooms prepare for every contingency; occasionally, they prepare a little too well. Tuesday’s courtroom finale in the Ryan Routh trial ended with a federal jury convicting him on all counts for the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump—an outcome the public expected and the jury delivered.
What landed like an editorial blooper bomb, however, was an ephemeral glitch at The New York Times: an automated, prewritten “not guilty” headline briefly appeared online before being replaced with the correct “guilty” version within minutes.
Journalists have long written and saved multiple drafts ahead of predictable outcomes—elections, major trials, obituaries. It’s basic risk management for deadlines that don’t care if the news breaks at 4 a.m. or 4 p.m. Still, the sight of a national paper’s placeholder headline proclaiming “Man Found Not Guilty of Trying to Assassinate Trump in Florida” is disconcerting for two reasons.
Just searched Ryan Routh’s name @nytimes and got this result in the first head and subhead. I get it y’all have some kind of prewrite, but why is it preloaded? Routh was just convicted on all charges. Let’s make sure that’s the print edition tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/JfVi05ZrDk
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) September 23, 2025
First, it momentarily rewrites reality for anyone who saw the page in that narrow window. Second, it exposes the brittle mechanics of modern newsrooms: automation and prepublishing can compress an institution’s judgment into a single, embarrassingly public click.
The Times moved quickly to correct the record and appended a correction explaining the mistake, noting that prewritten pieces for both possible verdicts exist and that the incorrect version was published “inadvertently” for less than a minute.
That explanation will satisfy some readers. Others will point to precedent—print-era gaffes like the Chicago Daily Tribune’s infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman”—and use the moment to ask whether trust in elite media institutions has frayed beyond repair. Either way, an industry that trades on accuracy deserves scrutiny when it momentarily falters.
In what world does even a pre-writer think he would be not-guilty?
— Sarah Burris (@SarahBurris) September 23, 2025
Beyond the snafu, the substance of the case is sobering. Routh faced five federal counts stemming from a plot at a high-profile campaign event in September 2024, including attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate and assaulting a federal officer.
The jury’s unanimous verdict followed evidence the government presented and carries with it the potential for life sentences. The disturbing post-verdict detail—Routh’s reported attempt to stab himself with a pen—underscores a violent, chaotic episode that required marshals to intervene and that will leave long ripples in national security and campaign-protection conversations.
