Super fly

Do you know what I love about blogging (besides tricking friends and strangers into reading about the silly things I think and do each day)? I love the total absence of a typeset deadline.

Tonight I worked this obituary about a kindly dentist. It was a nice obit, and the head spex were quite reasonable. I sent it on feeling confident I'd neither screwed anything up nor missed any glaring errors. Of course, I was wrong. This obituary made it through several slot editors before one noticed that we said the guy died at age 81, just a couple of paragraphs before we stated his birth year: 1920. Doh! Math has never been my strong suit, but come on! How could I miss something like that? I blame lack of nicotine.

Anyway, we managed to correct the error in the few minutes we had until the all-too-numerous zone editions had to be off the floor. Had that slot editor not noticed the problem when he did, we'd have been screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed. As a journalist, I'm entrusted to uphold accuracy and truth and all that. For the sake of Journalism. And all that. But what concerns me most is how upset this dentist's family might have been had we gotten it wrong, and all because I read right over the discrepancy. Ugh.

We bloggers don't have this problem. For some (and you know who you are), blogging is an ongoing exercise in revision. We can revisit posts days, yea, months after writing them and say, "You know, that 'really' should really be italicized," and in a few deft keystrokes, we can publish the revision. Not so with print publications. No, if you used the term "potion" in a headline for a story about an anthrax-thwarting substance, you can't go back after deadline and change it to "lotion" just because it's a slightly more appropriate word. It's there for eternity, and there's nothing you can do about it.

This is one reason I'm enjoying the blogosphere so much. It's a copy editor's paradise.