We despise gremlins, yet they surround us daily

This business we affectionately call the “Newsroom Minefield and Trip Wire Maze” is fairly harmless at its worst, kind of fun at its best.
It’s rewarding when one of these columns touches a memory, emotion or a maybe even a funny bone and you seek me out to say so. Warm fuzzies for all of us here at the News-Times out-weight cold pricklies by a ton.
Because what we do is so very public, however, cold pricklies are stitched into the fabric of the job.
Even a doctor who makes an honest mistake and loses a patient is less publicly notorious than we are when we mis-spell or use a word incorrectly in a headline, place the wrong caption under a photo, etc.
Is this fair? No. Are the mistakes in these two examples equal or even proportional? Of course not.
Still, that’s the way it is.
In the crush of deadline pressure, one softball story is placed twice and another not at all. This is the kind of thing for which cold pricklies are designed, and rightly so. A wonderful writer, conscientious and careful to a fault, has her feelings deeply hurt when she didn’t deserve it.
Such is the nature of the biz.
How would I change things if I could. Well, obviously there would be no mistakes. We’d have actual proof-readers (or at least one) whose only job is to examine every letter, space and punctuation mark. However, because this is a business from which a profit is required that’s not realistic in terms of either time or dollars. So what do we do? We look out for each other best we can, that’s what. Do boo-boos get through despite our best efforts? Of course. How could they not when a single errant keystroke or click has the ability to make one story appear twice and another disappear altogether?
My wish would be that the nastiest cold prickly writers/callers be given the proverbial “walk a mile in our shoes” opportunity.
They might understand how such things happen. It’s not an excuse, but it is a reason. They would be amazed to learn that a clock’s tick gets louder and LOUDER and !!!LOUDER!!! as each individual second until deadline melts away. No problem to be 10 minutes late, you say? Wrong. It’s a huge problem to be one minute late. Our paper has to get there on time because, if it doesn’t, the entire Grand Island Independent readership is at risk of not getting their papers when they’re supposed to. Delivery schedules go in the tank, post office deadlines go the same way. It’s the Domino effect in vivid, brutal reality.
If this sounds like excuses, it’s not. If anyone out there thinks there’s a single person at the York News-Times who takes a cavalier attitude about the product we produce you are terribly mistaken. No one grieves any more than we do when the inevitable happens.
I’ve suggested to folks from time to time that they take one page of any newspaper ... just one ... and count every letter, number, space, punctuation mark and character that appears there. Remember, just one page among the many that every newspaper produces with every issue. No one has ever reported back how many they found. This is not at all surprising given how many there must be. And every one of them is a potential error, lying in wait to nip us right in the pride.
Dr. Example’s terrible mistake goes silently to the cemetery. Ours goes to the library where it lives forever.
Contact — stephen.moseley@yorknewstimes.com