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Published July 27, 1997
Computers are unfairly blamed for many things.
Thus, I don't like to blame computers for mistakes. Nor should computers be credited for the intelligent work of humans.
My love-hate relationship with computers started with a computer class in college. The student newspaper had computers. My advisor told me that I should take a computer class, because I probably would work with computers at some point. The advisor was prophetic.
That computer class involved going to the campus computer room and punching code into computer cards and feeding it into a giant computer, which might or might not deem my code worthy. The computer on my desk probably has more processing power than that monster had. I can honestly tell you that learning basic FORTRAN programming hasn't helped me a bit in the real world.
Once I worked for a newspaper that had frequent computer crashes. The newspaper actually had a "stoplight" in the newsroom. If the green light was on, you could work normally. If the yellow light went on, you should save your work and stop. If the red light burned brightly, it was too late. Frequently, the light went from green to red, and a lot of work was lost.
We also had to sit around waiting for the computers to be fixed. It was hard to find productive ways to use the time. For better or worse, I decided I wanted to know what was going on instead of just sitting around.
Later on, I was at another newspaper and decided to volunteer to fix the computers. I've been doing it since then. A few years ago I took up electronics as a hobby, and that helped my repair skills.
And now, with The Herald's marvelous new computer system, I find myself still fixing computers. Fortunately, we use a local firm to fix the hardware problems. But I still have to fix the news department's software problems, which can be a major task. But I would much rather fix a problem with a mouse and a few keystrokes than have to open up a box and test power supplies.
Sometimes computer gremlins cause us grief. Most readers probably noticed the problem with the continued stories in the July 20 edition. The computer system generates what is supposed to be an exact proofreading copy of the page that will go to the press department. On Sunday, it didn't do that. So, we got an unpleasant surprise. Instead of continuing the stories at the point they ended on one page, the stories started at the beginning on the continuation page. However, we have taken steps to prevent it from happening again.
The design of the software makes us vulnerable to the problem of ending stories in the middle of a sentence. This too is a problem we hope we have solved.
It is necessary to cut many of the stories we print. The New York Times has a motto of "All the news that's fit to print." In reality, newspapers often have to print all the news that fits. The stories do not fit perfectly into the space we have available. In order to give you a variety of coverage of things going on in Maury County, Tennessee, The United States and the world, we have to cut stories.
Usually, local stories are not cut. "Wire stories," or those provided by The Associated Press, are more likely to be cut. We try to cut the stories at a logical point. This process is done by people using a computer.
When mistakes are made, you can blame people. But it's not because the people are not working hard or conscientiously.
We strive for a standard of zero mistakes in the newspaper. It is a difficult standard to achieve. We work under considerable time pressure and also must deal with the unexpected. If a news story occurs very close to deadline, much work has to be redone quickly in order to get the story in print. When you have to do work in a hurry, the possibility of making an error increases.
A recent weekday edition of The Daily Herald featured approximately 7,700 words of news and commentary that were produced locally - not by wire services. There were at least a dozen locally-generated photographs.
Add to that total dozens of headlines, all of which are written locally. You can see that there are many, many opportunities for mistakes.
A reporter may write the equivalent of two college term papers a day - at least from the standpoint of length. The time required to research those stories may be fairly short, or could require a great deal of time. It's not something that's done in a leisurely fashion.
In the most extreme cases, stories are completed not much more than an hour before the press starts rolling.
The process is full of distractions - telephone calls, walk-in customers with news questions, wire bulletins, technical glitches and who knows what else.
But even with all of these challenges, it's our goal that each of those thousands of words is perfect.
And we'll try not to blame the computer for the bad ones that slip through.
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