July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
Almost right means entirely wrong again (12/07/05)
Back in the Saddle
By By JACK RONALD-
An old editor friend used to have a sign in his office that read, “If it’s almost right, it’s wrong.”
As someone who has made his share of mistakes in this business — you’ll recall that I prematurely “killed off” my childhood physician Ralph Steffy a couple of years ago in this column to my great embarrassment — I find that old motto often coming to mind.
In some professions, your screw-ups never see the light of day.
In the newspaper business, you print thousands of copies of your screw-up and deliver them to people’s homes for all to see. And once they’re published, they’re impossible to unpublish.
Still, the thought does occur to you now and then.
That’s why I found myself standing in the pressroom a couple of weeks ago with a baffled look on my face. We’d just printed Section C of the big day-before-Thanksgiving edition, and a screw-up — mine and mine alone — had just been discovered.
So I stood there, with my old friend’s “If it’s almost right, it’s wrong” echoing in my head, and considered the most drastic measure possible.
Should we, I thought, junk the entire press run, correct the mistake before it left the building, and re-print the entire section? It didn’t make economic sense, but that didn’t matter at the time.
I walked back through the pressroom. Stacks of already-stuffed Section D and Section C were everywhere. The inserters were busily putting the rest of them together.
Logistically, I concluded, it was impossible.
That left me with the sick-in-the-gut, almost-right solution of putting out a paper we were otherwise quite proud of which happened to contain a stupid mistake.
To make matters worse, it was the second time this year we’d made the same mistake.
Just for the record, Tim Miller is the guy who owns TJ’s Bike Shop and who is venturing into an eBay-related business. Tim Johnson is the guy who owns TJ’s Concrete.
They’re both really good guys, but they understandably grow weary of being mistaken for one another.
For some reason, while writing an article for the business section about Tim Miller’s business, I blanked on his last name.
Like a lot of people, I just think of him as TJ.
But I did recall that there’d been some confusion about his name in a cutline back in January after the ice storm and flooding.
So instead of calling TJ and asking the stupid question, “What’s your last name?” I did something stupider. I went to the newspaper morgue, checked a photo caption from January which I presumed — incorrectly — was accurate and picked up the same mistake we had made months ago, calling him Tim Johnson instead of Tim Miller.
Sure, I was on deadline. And sure, it’s our biggest edition of the year. But those are excuses, and they fall perilously close to arguing that something was almost right.
It wasn’t. It was wrong.
And I apologize to both Tim Miller and Tim Johnson for the confusion.[[In-content Ad]]
As someone who has made his share of mistakes in this business — you’ll recall that I prematurely “killed off” my childhood physician Ralph Steffy a couple of years ago in this column to my great embarrassment — I find that old motto often coming to mind.
In some professions, your screw-ups never see the light of day.
In the newspaper business, you print thousands of copies of your screw-up and deliver them to people’s homes for all to see. And once they’re published, they’re impossible to unpublish.
Still, the thought does occur to you now and then.
That’s why I found myself standing in the pressroom a couple of weeks ago with a baffled look on my face. We’d just printed Section C of the big day-before-Thanksgiving edition, and a screw-up — mine and mine alone — had just been discovered.
So I stood there, with my old friend’s “If it’s almost right, it’s wrong” echoing in my head, and considered the most drastic measure possible.
Should we, I thought, junk the entire press run, correct the mistake before it left the building, and re-print the entire section? It didn’t make economic sense, but that didn’t matter at the time.
I walked back through the pressroom. Stacks of already-stuffed Section D and Section C were everywhere. The inserters were busily putting the rest of them together.
Logistically, I concluded, it was impossible.
That left me with the sick-in-the-gut, almost-right solution of putting out a paper we were otherwise quite proud of which happened to contain a stupid mistake.
To make matters worse, it was the second time this year we’d made the same mistake.
Just for the record, Tim Miller is the guy who owns TJ’s Bike Shop and who is venturing into an eBay-related business. Tim Johnson is the guy who owns TJ’s Concrete.
They’re both really good guys, but they understandably grow weary of being mistaken for one another.
For some reason, while writing an article for the business section about Tim Miller’s business, I blanked on his last name.
Like a lot of people, I just think of him as TJ.
But I did recall that there’d been some confusion about his name in a cutline back in January after the ice storm and flooding.
So instead of calling TJ and asking the stupid question, “What’s your last name?” I did something stupider. I went to the newspaper morgue, checked a photo caption from January which I presumed — incorrectly — was accurate and picked up the same mistake we had made months ago, calling him Tim Johnson instead of Tim Miller.
Sure, I was on deadline. And sure, it’s our biggest edition of the year. But those are excuses, and they fall perilously close to arguing that something was almost right.
It wasn’t. It was wrong.
And I apologize to both Tim Miller and Tim Johnson for the confusion.[[In-content Ad]]
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