The thin skinned editor
Each week, I spend the 48-hour period from Wednesday evening until Friday evening, with a small pit in my stomach. That's the time between when the newspaper I work for goes to press and the time where I feel safe that I didn't make any egregious errors in my section like erroneously crediting a girls golfer with shooting a 116 when really she shot 114. The longer I make it without hearing anything, the safer I feel until I reach the weekend and, by that time, I figure anyone who still subscribes to our papers will have had at least one bowel movement. Frankly, bathroom reading material is about as useful as newspapers are these days, especially ours.
So if I get an e-mail on Friday evening, it's likely a minor offense brought to my attention by a casual reader of the paper or a reasonably sane parent. A name misspelling, a wrong date for an upcoming game, etc... I don't even answer my phone on Thursdays if it's a number I don't recognize. And if my phone buzzes before 9 a.m. on a Thursday... it's a doozy. Those calls are reserved for special instances and I can only recall two of them offhand.
1. Forgetting to run the story for the Lake Oswego football game one week. In fairness, it was something like a 45-0 shellacking of poor St. Helens and was easily the least important story that week. Still. You don't screw with football.
2. Intending to name a baseball player the aforementioned Athlete of the Week, but mistakenly naming his brother who had begrudgingly quit the team a few weeks earlier due to a playing time dispute.
Bad errors? Absolutely. But, especially with our dwindling resources which has, quite literally, left us without a single copy editor in my office, I am in constant fear of The Big One.
Today I was past my deadline and realized I had forgotten to include a baseball story that absolutely had to run. So I quickly changed my pages around, threw in the story and tossed on a headline before quickly sending it to press. I never gave the story a second read nor did I double-check the headline. Now the chances of something truly terrible somehow sneaking through is admittedly slim, but it's still not a position I want to be in. You don't know how many times I have been meaning to type the word "this" and, in my haste, wrote that word's unfortunate anagram.
When I first started doing lay-out at the paper and before I truly grasped how much of a mental disorder being the parent of a high school athlete truly is, I would type in space-fillers for headlines before going back and creating the real ones. Things like "Boys soccer team takes a dump in key game", "Girls lacrosse game slightly more fun than being shot in the face" "Wrestlers top Lions, showdown with sexual identity a draw". Now? Not a chance. I'm paranoid that my computer will inexplicably send an old auto-saved version of my document to the press that features the 45-minute period one of those headlines was on the page let alone being scared that I just might forget to change one.
So. on Thursday mornings I constantly watch my phone out of the corner of my eye and check my e-mail every 20 minutes, begging for no new messages. I do the same thing from about 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursday and Friday nights, when I assume people are most likely going to be reading the paper. You'd think after seven years of this I would have developed a better temperament and a thicker skin. I know the newspaper industry's vital signs have flatlined but every time I think that there isn't a single person who reads anything I actually put down in print, I make a mistake and then I wish that my previous assumption was true.
I'm not entirely convinced this is a mistake. If it wasn't,
it deserves a Pulitzer.
Where to invest?
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In Africa it's summer or winter now?
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