One thing about working at a newspaper – people never seem to hesitate to point out your mistakes.

On the positive side, this is a good thing. Accountability should always be taken in stride and seen as an opportunity to improve, to acquire knowledge, to learn from your mistakes, to not repeat dumb things over and over.

“Positive criticism,” right?

There has been a time or two where I’ve called someone out on the carpet in this space, so it’s only fair play to be able to take your own medicine, correct?

One doesn’t want to become known as “that guy” who can dish it out but can’t take it, right?

With a newspaper, for example, if you make a mistake, it’s “out there” for everyone to see and to point out. With many other jobs you might make a mistake and very few people will ever see it or realize it – but not with a paper. It’s out there in the public domain for worldwide consumption.

And worldwide reaction.

However, if I’ve learned anything in the past three decades, it’s this – there are always two sides to a story and seldom is an issue so “black and white” that there is an absolutely 100 percent correct answer on every issue and every topic and every controversy.

Plus, if you have established a good relationship with the community and your readers, you should be able to take the good with the bad. Your “customers” should feel comfortable in approaching you and say something without fear of reprisal or some written beat-down in next week’s hometown periodical.

But on the flipside, sometimes – sometimes people make you feel like you are the dumbest person in the world and you intentionally made that typo or that grammatical error just because you didn’t know any better.

Contrary to what some people think, we actually do read over the stories before they go into print. We don’t rely just on spell check. We still practice good old-fashioned proof reading. But, for every 100 corrections I make before the paper goes to press, once in a while a typo or some kind of other mistake will slip through.

My bad…

We readily admit we are not perfect, but it’s true – we really don’t put those occasional typos in there just to test your proofreading skills or knowledge of diagramming sentences.

I’m usually the first one to catch printed mistakes early on a Wednesday morning as the paper is distributed, but not always.

We occasionally will mess up a caption under a photo, for example.

Last week we had “manager” animals in the Stroll preview story instead of manger animals….not quite as bad as that time we had a church group “sinning” around the campfire. I also noticed a mistake on this very page last week.

In the heat of putting the paper together on Monday afternoon and into Tuesday morning, these things happen.

Please forgive us.

But go ahead and e-mail me about the error – I know you were going to, anyway….