Unfortunately, mistakes do happen

It is inherent in the nature of journalism and the newspaper business that we make mistakes.

It goes with the territory.

There’s not a printer alive who doesn’t have a story about a typo — one that made it into print or one that almost did — usually involving something like a sale of men’s shirts. Think about the typo potential and you’ll understand why something as simple as the word shirts can be a problem.

But just because we know that mistakes are made doesn’t mean we have to like them.

Earlier this month, I made a doozy.

Learning that James and Jenni Clear had lost their house to a lava flow on Hawaii, I hurried a story into print, relying largely on an internet posting by James’s step-father. 

Trouble is, I believed that the step-father, my friend Roger Domingo, and James’s mother, June, whom I’ve counted as a friend since about first grade, were in Hawaii with James and Jenni. 

They weren’t. 

They were here in Jay County working on a house remodeling project. And when I called Roger to ask a few questions, he wasn’t on the Big Island, viewing the devastation first-hand. Nope. He was about 2 miles away from me.

Needless to say, mistakes followed. As I said, my screw-up was a doozy.

But it wasn’t the first, and — I am afraid — it won’t be the last.

When you deal with words by the thousands each day, the gremlins sneak in.

And when they do, it is painful. 

Mistakes like that make me physically ill. Any good reporter will tell you there’s a very special feeling in your gut when you realize you’ve screwed up, and I don’t mean “special” in any positive way.

Printers feel the same way.

Wandering back to talk with our production manager, Brian Dodd, the day after my Hawaii fiasco, I started rambling about other mistakes made over a career that now stretches over more than four decades.

There was the time I wrote a piece about the adoption of the local option income tax, relying solely on newsroom files, only to discover that one clipping was missing from the files, the story about when the county had delayed the implementation of the tax. My story was fine; it was just six months premature.

And then, of course, there was the time I killed my childhood doctor in a column, referring to him as “the late,” only to learn that he was not only alive but as crusty and cantankerous as ever.

Brian listened. But as he listened, he started working on his own list of miscues.

And then he started chuckling.

What about, he said, that time we forgot something on page one?

It was a July 5 edition on a Saturday. I had handled most of the photo coverage of the Fourth — parade, activities at the fairgrounds, and all that.

Everything but the fireworks, which wouldn’t work with our deadlines.

I was also designing the front page that night because others had the holiday weekend off, and I put together what I thought was a pretty nice selection of photos for the front page, a nice full color spread that captured the day.

And when the paper came out the next morning, hours after I’d put it to bed and put myself to bed as well, the photographs looked great. The color reproduction was spot-on. The presswork was something to brag about.

But something was missing.

There were no captions for the photographs. Local readers could guess that the pictures had something to do with the Fourth of July, but we weren’t helping them by providing a lick of information.

For all they knew we were trying something experimental, using extra blank white space instead of those pesky words that usually accompany photos.

Brian still remembers the moment I came in on Monday morning and spread the paper out in front of him and asked the inevitable question: Where the heck are the captions?

It happens, he said.

Despite our best efforts, mistakes happen.

And they’ll happen again, I fear. But I’ll still be taking an extra careful look at every ad for a shirt sale.