Were you one of our winners for last week?

Lou Marzeles
Editor and Publisher

     Congratulations to the winners of our “Find the Mistake on this Page” contest in last week’s paper! Several people quickly noticed that we had the date wrong on our front page.
     This is our facetious way of acknowledging that we did indeed make that mistake last week. I don’t know of a newspaper in the country that hasn’t made a similar error—or worse—at least once. Back at The Washington Times years ago, there was a classic boo-boo in which a photo of a man and his dog ran with a caption that read “John Smith (left) with his dog...” Apparently the two looked so similar they had to be separately identified in the caption.
     We strive to be as fully professional in every regard as possible, and that includes our proofreading process. It can be a challenge to bring a newspaper to production with time-sensitive pressures and a small staff, which has to do the reporting, page layout, and proofreading collectively.
     But let’s move on—there are more compelling matters at hand. This week we have a story about goings-on in the Klickitat County Prosecuting Attorney’s office, and in some respects the story is much too premature to run. As of press time, there has been no opinion on the matter from the Office of Special Counsel. While some events in the matter were at least puzzling to some people, there is no indication as of the moment that anything illegal transpired. Yet the story is running now because we were getting calls and emails from people asking what was going on and from media around the area asking if we were covering it. Those media are picking up our story. It’s an example of a buzz getting around that itself becomes an aspect of a story, making it incumbent upon us to follow the smoke in search of a possible fire. Is there something ablaze here? The smoke is just starting to lift.