John Hammond: “Don’t worry, I’m not making the same mistakes again.” Dr. Ian Malcolm: “No, you’re making all new ones.” – The Lost World: Jurassic Park
No, it wasn’t a test to see if anyone was paying attention to our writing. It was a classic human error.
In our print issue published Oct. 25, eagle-eyed readers might have noticed something amiss under our Focus section on construction. The headline was right. The photos were right. But the story itself might have been like déjà vu, especially if you read Idaho Business Review from the first story to the last.
The body copy was actually our Breakfast Series report which ran in the pages before.
As production days can sometimes be busy and we work to make sure the captions are correct, bylines placed and dates are proper, misspellings and other things can get missed. In this case, I missed an entire story updating readers on the progress of the Meta data center in Kuna.
Sometimes page designers will flow in what we call dummy copy just to hold space and figure out photo placement before they place the actual story.
One of my first jobs in the newspaper industry was as a copy editor on a night desk. There were four of us proofing a daily paper, along with an editor and page designers who typically read through everything. Even then, with so many sets of eyes, something would be missed. We could always expect our editor’s wrath in red pen the next day at different points throughout the paper.
Probably one of the most egregious mistakes we had missed was placeholder text in a headline that read, “XXXXXHeadline goes hereXXXXXXXX.”
I’ve also worked as a page designer and, under tight deadlines, I’ve placed stories twice. Rarely have papers gone out with duplicated mistakes.
But the one thing all these gaffs had in common was the disappointment I had in myself for not putting out a spot-on perfect product. Our readers deserve that. We work hard to produce stories worthy of our readership, and we want them all to be shared. Even though someone might want to read a story twice, it’s better to turn back the pages to do so.
The story in this particular case, titled “Meta’s mega data center in Kuna on track to be completed by 2025,” has been published online and I’ve made sure it ran again in the Nov. 8 issue so that those who subscribe only to the print edition are able to read it there.
We will do our best in future to make sure such a mistake doesn’t happen again. But that doesn’t mean we won’t make others.
This post was originally published on here
