Opinion: Errors good for laugh – unless they're yours

I’m not a big fan of late-night television, except on Mondays, when “The Tonight Show” features Jay Leno and his “Headlines” segment. Leading off with the question, “How’d that make it past the copy editor?” Leno spends several minutes reading – and poking fun at – poorly worded headlines and advertisements, clipped from real newspapers and sent in to the show. They’re usually pretty funny. I guess it’s easy to laugh at someone else’s mistakes. But when we find them in our own paper, we do anything but laugh. Usually, there’s gnashing of teeth and a general consensus of, “What were we thinking?” in the newsroom.

Take, for example, the story by SBJ Reporter Jeremy Elwood, in the Jan. 10-16 issue. The story, “Local firms offer help to hurting Asia,” examines the ways that local businesses are helping the people who were devastated by the December earthquake and resulting tsunami.

Notice, I said tsunami. I know it was a tsunami. You know it was a tsunami. Anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave without television, radio or newspapers for the last few weeks knows it was a tsunami. And yet, right there on our cover, the deck headline reads, “Asian typhoon claims thousands; many more missing.”

Typhoon?

Ugh! Double-ugh! How did we miss that? Why did we miss that?

Those are the kinds of questions that are hardest to answer, because the mistake has already been made.

But I’ve talked with News Editor Eric Olson, and we agree that our New Year’s resolution is to make fewer mistakes. And as we strive to bring our readers the best and latest business news in southwest Missouri, you can bet our minds will be even more focused than before on providing it without errors.

We’ll do that by reading each piece of copy as though it were the first time we’ve seen it. We’ll put ourselves in your shoes, in other words. That’s nothing unusual, given that when we decide what to put on our pages, we ask ourselves what news our readers might most like to see. The problem with our copy editing, if you ask me, is that sometimes we read a piece of text already knowing in our minds what the story is about. Thus, we see what it SHOULD say, and not necessarily what it DOES say. Typhoon vs. tsunami. Big difference.

But as my inner optimist likes to say, “Onward and upward from here.”

After all, this is the perfect time of year to be thinking about changes for a new year. In this issue, with our Inside Business focus on Health and Wellness, we’re taking a closer look at popular resolutions and tools that can help you reach them.

This is also our first Lifestyle & Leisure issue of 2005. It has a glossy cover and more of a magazine feel to it, and it’s all about local businesspeople. That is, after all, why we’re here – and why we’ve been here for a quarter of a century. We’ll be doing a Lifestyle & Leisure publication every quarter, and it’s a challenge that I’m looking forward to meeting head-on.

Happy anniversary, SBJ

In the newsroom and throughout the company, we’re really getting into the anniversary celebration. From a news perspective, we’re on the lookout for companies that are celebrating significant anniversaries.

Many sources I’ve talked to through the years have taught me that starting a business is no easy task – and that for some, making it a year is significant – but for our purposes, significant is defined as an anniversary ending in zero or five.

While we’ve still got a lot of digging to do, I’ve been amazed at all of the neat companies that are out there, and what they’ve done to reach their significant milestones. These companies are eager to talk about what they’re doing, and I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as our writers enjoy covering them.

I can’t wait to see what 2005 holds for the southwest Missouri business community and for SBJ. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Maria Hoover is Springfield Business Journal Inside Business editor.