Year-in-Review Gaffe

I should have responded to this comment made the blog earlier. Chris writes:

"can you explain how you managed to misspell the names of three of the most prominent activists on campus on the cover of the end of the year issue? we have a hard time believing diversity coverage is such a big deal when your fact-checking process manages to miss the only three names of black students you included. one step forward, four steps back."

There's no question that this is an obscene-seeming error. As Chris rightly points out, at a time when we as a paper are truly trying to improve our diversity coverage, just weeks after the botched story about the Ethnic Studies teach-in, this mistake seemingly confirms to those communities that have felt ostracized by us in the past and to whom we have attempted to reach out that we just don't care.

The basic answer for how we managed to misspell the names is exactly what Chirs said: We didn't fact-check the cover.

As I have said before, there is a lengthy editing process on every article that we do, and this was adhered to for the Year-in-Review. I spent a few hours in the office on Friday night doing the first set of reads and then got into the office at about 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning for a 12-hour editing stint. Erin and I, Jon and Jon, and Ian were all there editing copy as Mady and Lana laid out the page. At about seven, the production editors had to go (It was, after all, finals week) but Erin, Ian, John, Amanda, and I stuck around to do a few sets of printouts on the news content. When I left the office that day, we were set to go on the content.

But the cover hadn't gone through a single read. Lana was coming in the next day to finish it up. I showed up as well to make a couple of suggestions that I knew I had. When I got there, I saw Amanda, she said she would take care of it, and I went to the Math library to study for stats. The cover was never read by myself or by copy, and as such, the mistakes slipped through. It's a sad coincidence--but a coincidence all the same--that Jenni, Christien, and Bryan were the three people whose names we misspelled.