We've been getting calls this week about mistakes in the printed editions of The News. Things like jump lines that take readers to the wrong page for the continuation of a story. And lines that are repeated in a story or dropped from a story. And factual mistakes in stories. And facts left out of stories. And words that are misspelled.
To the callers who often tell me that "we don't know what we're doing," I say this: every weekday morning we publish five editions of the newspaper. Each edition is zoned to specific areas in our community with specific stories about those areas. And by the end of the night, we've handled as many words as would fill a very. very large book.
During one night's shift, we handle hundreds of stories and as many pages. And since human beings edit and lay out the paper, mistakes are made. Often it's a case of the right hand losing track of what the left hand is doing.
In other words, since content is added and dropped from all editions, mistakes happen. But they are also caught and fixed, often while the presses are running.
In a perfect world all mistakes would be taken care of before the presses do their work so everyone would get a "clean" paper. But with so many thousands of papers that need to get on the delivery trucks and taken to all eight counties of Western New York, the editing process continues as the presses roll.
It's not a perfect process. But we fix the technical errors as soon as they are identified, and own up to content mistakes in the Corrections and Clarification section on Page A2.
In a modern-day society that hides mistakes rather than own up to them, our process works better than most.
