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For the record, we newspaper folks are people too, and sometimes mistakes get made. For example, my obits are written and given an initial proofreading by me. Then they're measured for length and proofread again at the copy desk. Then they're sent to be placed on the actual page and proofread once more. And after all that, mistakes still can get through...because we have only a few hours to get an entire day's worth of news written, measured, arranged, printed, and bundled, all the while being bombarded with phone calls, weird visitors, screaming banshee soccer moms, and the occasional train exploding a couple blocks away. Even stuff the spell checker SHOULD catch, it sometimes doesn't, not for any reason I can figure out (for instance, my spell checker seems to think "principel" is a word, but it always freaks out and tries to correct "Dulles" into "Dallas").
I'm not trying to attack anyone, and if it seems like I have, I'm sorry, not my intention. I only say this because I've realized that a lot of people just don't realize that the vast majority of news vendors don't have just a proofreading department, that we do it in addition to all our other duties...and the vast majority of people get ridiculously angry with us for making mistakes. I can't tell you how often people call literally SCREAMING at me about something as simple as a misplaced comma, calling us a "rag" and usually proclaiming that USA Today is a much better paper and THEY don't make mistakes (total bullsheet, btw, they have mess-ups in every one of their papers).
Of course, my all-time personal favorites have to be the ones who insist that we should hire them to proofread it because THEY will not make ANY mistakes. To them, I present this argument.
Our smaller papers are still about 32 full size, front-and-back pages. If you were going to actually read, word for word, every story, ad, and classified in that paper, no matter how fast you are at reading, we'll say it takes you about an hour. (And let me put forth that I don't think half the ones yelling at me read above a fifth-grade level...)
Okay, so let's say it takes you an hour to read all of it. Now, do it with the reporters constantly yanking their stories out of your hands, making corrections, and sending it back. And with your phone ringing every ten minutes so that the ad folks downstairs can cancel this ad, increase that ad, this one misspelled his son's name, etc. Then figure in that it's three and you were supposed to have the obit page laid out by four, but the obits aren't done yet because the girl doing them is too busy chasing a wild-eyed methhead out of the newsroom because guess what, you're working somewhere that barely has lockable doors, let alone actual security, and oh yeah, it's located in scenic downtown, right between the jail full of meth addicts, the adult bookstore with a meth lab in the back, a couple of former churches that are now meth labs, the meth lab that got busted and was empty for three weeks before being reformed into ANOTHER meth lab, and a condemned hotel that will BE a meth lab as soon as the druggies figure out how to break in. By the way, take a guess at why our roaches are so hard to kill.
And then when you do finally get the obits at 3:30, and there are 112 inches of them that you have to make fit into 100 inches of space, you get called into a meeting to discuss laying out the REST of the paper for that night, during which time it can be virtually counted on that some idiot somewhere will drive his motorcycle into the side of a school bus, and suddenly EVERYTHING has to get shifted back around because the front page story has changed. So now you have to do ALL of it all over again.
Oh, and while all this is going on, don't forget, you're supposed to be proofreading this stuff. And don't count on the reporters to do it, because even though they try, they're working on about five stories at a time, trying to coax leads out of reluctant, crooked politicians, keep the editors off their backs for not having their stories in at the crack of noon, tread a line between reporting the truth and reporting something that will get their ass sued, having to deal with whatever random hobo comes wandering through with a briefcase supposedly full of court documents but which usually contains underwear or ten copies of Mein Kampf, AND take the phone calls from people who don't understand the laws of time and space, in that if something happened at 10 this morning, it is WRONG that this story is not in today's paper. Oh, and don't forget that chick at the front desk who is constantly reminding them that she's LOOKING for an excuse to hurt them.
Now, honestly, not every day is like this, some of them are perfectly calm and things get done on time...but at least half of them are sunk in SOME kind of melodramatic version of the above. So mistakes slip through. So long as it doesn't completely change the story (like a recent one where one of the reporters almost sent through a court story that said "guilty" instead of "innocent"), we consider it acceptable damage and concentrate on the next day's paper. We're not re-running a 20-inch story because in one spot, we used "its" instead of "it's". No. Just no.
Yeah, just needed to let that rant out for a while. We've been getting it with both barrels from these people this week.
I'm not trying to attack anyone, and if it seems like I have, I'm sorry, not my intention. I only say this because I've realized that a lot of people just don't realize that the vast majority of news vendors don't have just a proofreading department, that we do it in addition to all our other duties...and the vast majority of people get ridiculously angry with us for making mistakes. I can't tell you how often people call literally SCREAMING at me about something as simple as a misplaced comma, calling us a "rag" and usually proclaiming that USA Today is a much better paper and THEY don't make mistakes (total bullsheet, btw, they have mess-ups in every one of their papers).
Of course, my all-time personal favorites have to be the ones who insist that we should hire them to proofread it because THEY will not make ANY mistakes. To them, I present this argument.
Our smaller papers are still about 32 full size, front-and-back pages. If you were going to actually read, word for word, every story, ad, and classified in that paper, no matter how fast you are at reading, we'll say it takes you about an hour. (And let me put forth that I don't think half the ones yelling at me read above a fifth-grade level...)
Okay, so let's say it takes you an hour to read all of it. Now, do it with the reporters constantly yanking their stories out of your hands, making corrections, and sending it back. And with your phone ringing every ten minutes so that the ad folks downstairs can cancel this ad, increase that ad, this one misspelled his son's name, etc. Then figure in that it's three and you were supposed to have the obit page laid out by four, but the obits aren't done yet because the girl doing them is too busy chasing a wild-eyed methhead out of the newsroom because guess what, you're working somewhere that barely has lockable doors, let alone actual security, and oh yeah, it's located in scenic downtown, right between the jail full of meth addicts, the adult bookstore with a meth lab in the back, a couple of former churches that are now meth labs, the meth lab that got busted and was empty for three weeks before being reformed into ANOTHER meth lab, and a condemned hotel that will BE a meth lab as soon as the druggies figure out how to break in. By the way, take a guess at why our roaches are so hard to kill.
And then when you do finally get the obits at 3:30, and there are 112 inches of them that you have to make fit into 100 inches of space, you get called into a meeting to discuss laying out the REST of the paper for that night, during which time it can be virtually counted on that some idiot somewhere will drive his motorcycle into the side of a school bus, and suddenly EVERYTHING has to get shifted back around because the front page story has changed. So now you have to do ALL of it all over again.
Oh, and while all this is going on, don't forget, you're supposed to be proofreading this stuff. And don't count on the reporters to do it, because even though they try, they're working on about five stories at a time, trying to coax leads out of reluctant, crooked politicians, keep the editors off their backs for not having their stories in at the crack of noon, tread a line between reporting the truth and reporting something that will get their ass sued, having to deal with whatever random hobo comes wandering through with a briefcase supposedly full of court documents but which usually contains underwear or ten copies of Mein Kampf, AND take the phone calls from people who don't understand the laws of time and space, in that if something happened at 10 this morning, it is WRONG that this story is not in today's paper. Oh, and don't forget that chick at the front desk who is constantly reminding them that she's LOOKING for an excuse to hurt them.
Now, honestly, not every day is like this, some of them are perfectly calm and things get done on time...but at least half of them are sunk in SOME kind of melodramatic version of the above. So mistakes slip through. So long as it doesn't completely change the story (like a recent one where one of the reporters almost sent through a court story that said "guilty" instead of "innocent"), we consider it acceptable damage and concentrate on the next day's paper. We're not re-running a 20-inch story because in one spot, we used "its" instead of "it's". No. Just no.
Yeah, just needed to let that rant out for a while. We've been getting it with both barrels from these people this week.
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