LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: MISTAKES ARE USEFUL, IF YOU LEARN SOMETHING

The giant snowball of colossal mistakes came crashing through the newsroom last week.

If you have ever made a snowball during a wet snowfall and pushed the snowball around, you know what happens: It picks up more and more snow until you have a giant snowball.

That is what happened to the batch of colossal mistakes last week. It kept getting pushed around, and it seemed to pick up more and more mistakes as it went rolling around the newsroom.

Any workplace has weeks like this occasionally. It is a time when each new mistake adds a thousand pinpricks to your super-sensitive skin. Your propensity for mistakes doubles and quadruples proportionately.

The biggest goof-up of all was noticed by plenty of readers, and well it should have been. The "Strictly Business" column, a weekly collection of business news and notices, was a repeat of a column that had been published some time ago. Readers who didn't immediately make that connection were mystified by the column's content. Some who possibly missed the column the first time around were less confused, but anyone who keeps up with business in our area was jarred by old news presented as fresh information.

How could something like this happen? That was a frequently asked question both inside the newspaper building and among readers.

First off, let's make sure everyone knows it wasn't the fault of Ray Owen. He wrote his column for last week and left the page layout to editors. Rest assured Ray would never try to rerun a column.

It had to do with what we newspaper folks call "slugs." These are the names given each story or column as a quick identifier. Stories stored in the computer system are retrieved by locating the slug of a story. So when it came time to retrieve Ray's column for the business page, the slug led editors to the old column. That is because there happened to be more than one column with the same slug in different locations in the computer system.

We have learned something from the mixup. We have a new system of slugging stories, and we have new guidelines for erasing stories from the computer system once they have been published.

Like giant snowballs that eventually melt, big screw-ups diminish too. The meltdown is speeded up considerably when we use mistakes to find ways to keep them from happening again. The goal in the newsroom is to keep the heat up high enough to prevent another snowstorm.

R. Joe Sullivan is editor of the Southeast Missourian. If you have comments, call 335-6611.