Cambridge News
A Twitter user spotted this headline mistake Twitter/Chris Rand

Spare a thought for staff at daily newspaper Cambridge News whose spectacular front page blunder has the internet cracking up.

Their headline for Wednesday's edition (December 6) read: '100PT SPLASH HEADING HERE', after a staff member clearly forgot to update placeholder text.

Anyone who has studied journalism will know that a splash is the industry term for the daily edition's front page story.

Political analyst Chris Rand spotted the error and posted it to his Twitter account with the caption: "Wow. It's real. This'll be featured in newspaper sub-editing courses for years. And available at all good newsagents near you today, folks."

His tweet has been met with hilarity so far on social media. Already it has been retweeted over 2,000 times since it was posted earlier today.

Some even have their own conspiracy theory about the mistake:

Cambridge News has now apologised to readers for the mistake which seems to be entirely innocent.

On their website they wrote:

"The Cambridge News is issuing an apology to its readers after an error with the front page of today's (December 6) edition of the newspaper.

Due to a technical problem, the main headline did not appear on the Cambridge edition, although the correct one was printed in the Cambourne edition of the paper."

Editor-in-chief David Bartlett said: "I want to apologise sincerely to our readers for this mistake, which happened due to a technical problem.

"We are still looking into how this happened and want our readers to know we take this seriously."