One term I didn’t see mentioned, and I may be dating myself here, from the days of hot type – the hellbox – a box that sat behind the Linotype for miscast or cast-off lead slugs, held there until being remelted in the pot.

IAMAP but off the top of my head the most virtuous press jargon I can think of is (something like) ‘priests’ and ‘friars’.

Which, it might well be noted, refer to mistakes – particular kinds of accidental ink blotch.

Call them whatever bloodless term you want to come up with, but I, for one, will continue to kill widows and orphans.

Colle+Mcvoy made an online game last year, where they showed you an illustration, and you had to find all of the dark design terms in it.

They have since taken the game offline, but you can see the illustration here: http://creativebits.org/print/design_not_for_the_faint_of_heart ,
or just google “Design not for the faint of heart”

It’s actually a pretty cool piece, they sold a limited run of prints of the illustration with all the answers on the back.

She needed one more obit to make the page fit nicely.

Terrifying.

Same with beat, which simply references a policeman’s beat, which in turn derives from the rhythmic, periodic beating of their feet as they walk their wonted rounds: nothing negative in that, surely. The OED does record a sense of beat as “A success scored against rivals by a reporter or newspaper; an item of news secured and published in advance of competitors,” but this doesn’t seem to be the one you’re referencing: I take you to mean generally one’s wonted subject as a reporter.

Words have histories and meanings: the senses we can apply to them are quite often the latest ones, and often inaccurate as to the primary and original senses of the word. Nice try, though!