The importance of double checking your work

Another reporter and I worked really hard over the past week to put together a two-page “year in review” spread for A&E. On Monday night I saw the initial layout and it looked awesome! It was such a nice balance of text and pictures. But I was a little disappointed when I opened up the paper today and with one of the sections in that article, a bunch of text on the right hand side was cut off, making that part of the article difficult to read. At first I thought it might be a printing error but when I went to post the story to the Web site, I noticed that it was the same in InDesign, so it was a design mistake.

I don’t want this to come off sounding like a rant because that’s not how it’s meant, and really there are so many worse things that could have happened. But on the initial layout I saw all the text was there. Part of it stuck off to the right side framing a picture, and that’s the part that got cut off. My guess is that when whoever was doing the corrections on it was fixing something the copy editors caught, it made it a little longer and cut part of it off. I know it was late and people were tired and wanted to go home, but this could have been fixed pretty easily. The paper goes through several people to make sure things like this don’t happen, and I think a chunk of text disappearing is probably something that shouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

I’m not blaming anyone because honestly it was just a careless mistake. Everyone makes them and everyone learns from them. But with bits of text missing from line to line, it was difficult to read and some people probably just skipped over it. I think I was mostly disappointed that this error happened to this particular section because it was a rememberance of someone who died, so it was something that I especially wanted people to read. Things like this happen to everyone at every newspaper, and sometimes it’s impossible to catch everything. I just wanted to emphasize the importance of always, always double checking your work!