Bidness As Unusual

by Paul Flemming

It was all my fault.

The Jan. 19 Springfield Business Journal contained an error, an error of the glaring sort.

Two photos were placed incorrectly on the front page, resulting in the misidentification of both subjects, both prominent business leaders.

The events where each of the men were photographed took place on our deadline. A staff member shot the photos, had the film developed and the pictures printed in quick order.

When the photos were returned to our offices, the paper had already been wrapped up and delivered to our production department with holes left in the appropriate places for insertion of the photos by our production manager.

I turned the photos over and wrote the names of the subjects and the instruction for placement on the back. I handed them over. Our production manager followed my instructions exactly.

They were wrong.

Mr. Stack went in Mr. Mahoney's spot and vice versa. You, I'm sure, noticed. If not, please refer to the correction on the front page.

This mistake is not my first, nor is it the Business Journal's. It is notable because of its prominence.

With each new error, I am humbled and newly committed to vigilance. By now, if I were learning from my mistakes, I should be perfect. I am not. It made us look silly. It undermines the credibility of the Business Journal. To all our readers, all our advertisers and all the staff, I apologize.

In this case, both Mr. Stack and Mr. Mahoney were good-natured about the mix-up. I called both to apologize personally.

Mr. Stack suggested we run Paul Newman's picture with his name underneath it.

A colleague suggested running a milk-carton plea to identify the two men that we so plainly mislabeled.

My boss, Publisher Dianne Elizabeth, was generous in her admonitions as well.

When I called her on Saturday (subscribers even get errors early) to apprise her of the mistake, she said she would suffer over the error, but was glad I had called and would be suffering myself. A shared burden can sometimes be a lighter burden. But not always.

Because this error was so obvious, it has gained a bit of attention. That makes it no different from the other errors the Business Journal has published.

A black eye may be more apparent than clothes-covered contusions and internal bleeding, but it is not necessarily worse.

For all the errors we commit, I apologize. That, I know, is small comfort to those who are the victims of our failures.

We have in place policies and practices to eliminate errors in the first place, to catch mistakes throughout the process of publishing the paper, and to double-check the first checks and then check them again. It is not fail-safe.

Stories in the Business Journal are checked by their authors for accuracy with the major sources of the stories. Each story is copy edited and vetted for misspellings of names, places and organizations, as well as being checked for overall sense. All of our pages are then proofread twice, by two different pairs of eyes, for consistency, style and accuracy.

If errors do occur, the Business Journal swiftly and commensurately publishes a correction to that error. It's gut-wrenching as a weekly to wait those seven days to get the right information in front of our readers.

I hope you can trust that these are not just words to me, but a sincere, personal commitment to accuracy, context and clarity.

I am more than willing to stand up and be held accountable for my errors. If you are not willing to do that, you have no business taking credit for achievements. I enjoy our triumphs too much to abdicate responsibility for them.

I abhor my own and the Business Journal's failures. I apologize for them and vow to eliminate them. Credit where credit is due, and take the lumps you've got coming to you.

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