Errors Among Us

Okay, okay, Andy Bechtel over at The Editor's Desk started this. He apparently was in a confessional mood and noted a couple of errors from his editing past. So here are two of mine. Of course, nothing like this will ever happen again. :(

The first occurred back at the Lorain (Ohio) Journal, where I got my newspaper start as a high school kid taking sports box scores and writing little game stories from them. Eventually, I was allowed to write headlines: Lorain 10, Elyria 7. You know, scintillating stuff.

Then someone mentioned using "5" to refer to a boys' basketball team (Girls still had six on a team and played half court. And there really weren't any girls' teams beyond intramurals. Oh, how time flies.)

Anyway, I got so enamored of "5" that one night I used it every chance I got. Man, those headlines sang! Since some of the back sports pages were assembled by backshop printers and not laid out, let alone designed, by editors, type was shoveled into pages wherever it fit. That led to one sports page having 10 "5" headlines right next to each other. I never used it again.

Then there was the Pulitzer that wasn't. At The Hartford Courant, it was my job to oversee the year-in-review section, and, in 1978, for the first time, we were planning to use color. This was a big deal at the time since color processing was slow, very slow and required lots of lead time. I wanted to use a photo of two airplanes that had collided in September near San Diego; one lone, non-newspaper photographer had captured two shots. The Courant had failed to run the pictures the first night they were available, so getting them in color at the end of the year seemed a smart move. So for weeks, literally, I obsessed over this picture, tracking down the photographer, getting the slides, his permission to use them, getting them converted to our use, etc., etc. I began to worship this picture and regularly patted myself on the back for my hard work. I was convinced it would win a Pulitzer. Thinking that it would transformed into had. So we closed in on the section, I quickly wrote a cutline for The Photo, had it set in type, closed the section, saw it printed the next day and that was it.

Until quite some time later, when someone carefully noted that my cutline had awarded the photo a Pulitzer. Of course, the prizes for that year hadn't been awarded yet and, guess what? It didn't win even when the prizes WERE awarded.

Years later, while working with editor trainees, two of my bosses and I wanted to help the rookies get over their fears of making errors. So the two assistant managing editors and I agreed that, at a luncheon, we would each tell a story of how we'd made a mistake and yet survived. I went first. After telling this story, the two bosses looked at each other, said words to the effect that they had NEVER made such a stupid mistake, and that was the end of confession time.


And there's one more involving a caption about a blind woman but I refuse to go any further.