While the rest of us were burning hot dogs on the grill last week, the newspaper industry seemed to be lighting itself on fire.

There have been cracks in publishing operations that are both hilarious and terrifying. The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., published a box score for a baseball game that was never played, after one of the coaches made up a result to spare the other team the embarrassment of a forfeit.

The U-T, the daily newspaper of San Diego, published a two-week-old blog post — on its front page. And most notoriously, “This American Life” revealed that Journatic, a content farm owned in part by the Tribune Company that produces local articles on the cheap, was using fake bylines. Some of those hyperlocal pieces, which ran in newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle, were written in the Philippines.

Equally confounding, when The Times-Picayune of New Orleans got around to offering jobs to some of its employees in its lower-cost digital news operation — the print newspaper will come out three times a week — many of the more prominent staff members took a look at the business plan and said, “No thanks.”