Filling holes and fixing mistakes

TOM HESS / HUNGRY HORSE NEWS

From my vantage point at the Hungry Horse Newscabin last Saturday, I saw shoppers come and go at Pamida to the west and Glacier Wallflower floral shop to the east. All that commerce in a down economy made me happy for Columbia Falls.

But Iwasn't simply enjoying a leisurely afternoon of people-gazing. Instead, I did something quite mundane but very necessary: I shoveled dirt and gravel into the axle-busting holes throughout our parking lot.

Every one of you out there works hard to make your homes and businesses function, and we at the Hungry Horse News aren't much different. We try to make our grounds and office safe and hospitable, and we think of ways to save energy, cut costs and … well … fill holes.

It's common in newsrooms to refer to the blank spaces between the ads of the next edition as the "news hole."

We strive each week to fill those holes with information you can use and trust. Most times we hit the mark, but sometimes we don't, and last week's edition offered some glaring examples of mistakes that needed fixing.

First, I correctly stated in this space that Columbia Falls High School is just one of many Montana schools that hosted Veterans Day events this year. (Whitefish is one of them.) But I erroneously reported on A1 that no other Montana school does so. In my haste to fill the news hole, I forgot to get right on A1 what I had written here.

Also on A1, I hit the keys B-N-S-F correctly for a caption and in the body copy but got them terribly out of order for the headline.

And in this space, like an ignorant newcomer, I referred in a postscript to Columbia Hills, as if I didn't know the name of the town to which I relocated and fell in love with a month ago.

Honest newspapers run corrections and clarifications to set the record straight, and that's our commitment to you, the readers. That's why I'm taking this week's column to spell out each and every error I'm aware of. But I also want you to know the steps I'm taking to make certain it doesn't happen again.

One person who will help improve the accuracy of our newspaper in future editions is Leslie Armstrong, who serves the public from the front desk of our office. Born in Malta in 1966, Leslie grew up carefully reading the local weekly newspaper, the Phillips County News. She dutifully completed her nightly vocabulary homework, and she watched her dad 'read the print right off the paper." All that training has made Leslie an excellent proofreader.

Leslie is helping out because, like me and the rest of the team, the Hungry Horse News ultimately belongs to the community, and we owe it to all of you to get things right.