DALE EVA ECKHARDT Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:00 am
The Casper Star-Tribune produces a newspaper every day of the year. Weekends, holidays, rain, sleet or shine - it's on your doorstep each morning. And that means a lot of us work some mighty strange hours - nights, weekends - not your typical M-F, 9 to 5 job.
I happen to be in the strange-hours category. For those of you who called, e-mailed and wrote letters to the editor about the headline on Monday's front page using the word "allude" instead of "elude," I'm the one at fault.
I'm the person in charge of the news part of the paper on Sunday for Monday's paper and we have a very small crew working that day. We find the stories, read them for accuracy, find photographs, write headlines for the stories and photos and design and paginate (create the pages on a computer before they are made into negatives for the press) the pages for your Casper, Wyoming, wire-service and front-page stories. We answer phone calls, Web publish the stories that go in the paper and generally do a lot of multitasking and sometimes we screw up.
On most days, I do know what allude means. A better headline would have been "Weatherman alludes to snow; it eludes state." I had checked the page before it went to print. Another employee checked the headline. It passed both of us right by. We read the headlines and the stories and the page numbers and the dates and check the first edition of the paper when it comes out at 9:30 p.m,. correcting errors that we find. Sorry Jackson readers -- you and those on the fringes of the state see all our mistakes. We even read headlines aloud on the negatives before the Casper edition goes to press. And still, mistakes are made. The irony of it is we are trying for perfection. We are trying to produce a paper that is accurate and because we are human, we make errors - sometimes stupid errors.
In the early '90s, I tried to make a headline I was working on better. I was trying to use the words Indian and education in the same headline and the final result was Indian educationing. This went out for all the state to read. My editor at the time told me to absorb the mistake and then put the page away and never mention it again. But it has stayed with me for 15 years.
Will I repeat allude instead of elude again? Never. But it's highly likely that sometime - in years or weeks or days - some other headline will be messed up.
Like in a relationship where you say something you wish you could immediately take back but you never can, once words are on the printed page, they can't be erased with whiteout, by hitting delete or erasing. Once we send the page, it's out for thousands to read. It's on the Internet; it's in libraries; it's on the bottom of bird cages; it's on coffee shop tables. Like India ink, it's permanent and the stains don't wash out.
So, readers, keep being diligent. You never know, the next error might be a real foozled bungle.
Dale Eckhardt is the relief editor and she works evenings and weekends. You can reach her at 307-266-0605 or dale.eckhardt@casperstartribune.net