We aren't perfect
Like a lot of jobs, the newspaper business is sometimes a thankless job. Reporters cover city and county government, school districts, hospital districts, and planning commissions. We cover these meetings because the public wants to be informed but doesn't want to sit through all the meetings.
We bend the rules, stretch the deadlines, and generally work ourselves to a frazzle each week to make sure the public is informed.
We love every minute of it.
We don't mind hearing from irate readers who disagree with our coverage or opinions. Most readers are quick to point out our mistakes but never bother to tell us when they like something.
That's OK. We even love that aspect of the business.
What we don't love is finding a glaring error after the paper comes out. We're not perfect, and errors do occur (more often than we care to admit). We try to correct, clarify, and rectify each incident but sometimes space just doesn't permit us to rerun an entire story or photo and cutline.
Our reporters are responsible, talented, and educated. Every story gets read, edited, and reread several times. Still, mistakes are made. Ultimately, the responsibility to catch errors comes down to the man — or in this case, the woman — in charge.
For example, a reader caught this error in last week's paper: "Lower seed doesn't phase MHS girls." Obviously, it should have been "faze." Obviously, we didn't catch it.
It's a learning process. We continue to strive for perfection but will settle for improvement each week. Most weeks we succeed. Some weeks we don't.
Just like stories that come in after deadline, errors will continue to show up. We do our best to be accurate but sometimes we'll make mistakes.
It isn't phatal, but we'll aksept the blame.
— DONNA BERNHARDT
