Learning, and sometimes failing, in the public eye

When you make a mistake in tne news biz, everyone sees it.

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I’ve worked as a journalist for 14 of my 47 years, but during that time I’ve always worked as a reporter or feature writer, never as an editor. And I’ve never laid out a newspaper before, until last week.

And, as some of you may have noticed, it could have gone a little better than it did. I left off the second sports page.

If you’re one of our regular readers you’re aware that our most recent editor left us two weeks ago, which left me – someone who has never paginated a newspaper before – to paginate last week’s newspaper.

Like the second string quarterback taking the field during a big game I was quite overwhelmed at how fast everything was coming at me. And like the second string quarterback who is so overwhelmed by the four linebackers bearing down on him he fails to notice the wide open receiver in the flat, I too overlooked something very obvious during the last hour deadline rush and didn’t send the second sports page to the printers.

It was an important page too, a bad one to overlook, because it contained the second half of the story of our high school football team’s amazing season and rare achievement of earning the title of 3A north section champions. I know if I was on that team and had been working out and sacrificing for the last three or four years to get to that point I’d want to clip it out and put it in my scrapbook.

Like nearly all professions the newspaper business isn’t very forgiving of mistakes. I can’t say, But I got 13 pages correct. That’s like a stage actor saying, But I only forgot a tenth of my lines, or a quarterback saying, But I only threw two interceptions.

So sorry about that Sand Devils players and fans. We have re-run that story in this week’s paper in case anyone wants to clip it out.

I will continue to paginate the newspaper as we move forward and I welcome the challenge. I take pride in my work, I take pride in Page, and I want to do a great job telling your stories.