Correction of the Year: Features Division

My question here is why in the hell do you hold any story four to six months? That's ridiculous. Seems like laziness to me on the Feature Editor's part. My gosh the reporter did his job. It's a daily not a monthly something. I think the editors here are far more to blame than the reporter for holding the story too damn long. That's absurd. Hell if someone held my story that long, I'd figure it just got shit-canned because it wasn't good enough. You cannot convince me that for 4-6 months they could not find a nice place to run it and display it properly before the couple died.

What a joke. The Express owed them an apology and explanation. No paper is ever perfect but that is just poor management all the way around.

 

Bad luck on the reporter's part but, as others have said, that should have been checked. When I worked down in the Wiregrass, I had to do a weekly senior profile. One person I profiled I had met on Friday for the interview, spent a couple of hours talking to him and learning about his life, talking to his friends and family, too. Wrote it up that afternoon for Monday's paper. He died on Sunday and I learned about it because I was putting the death notices together. Called the editor and he decided to keep the profile in, but with an editor's note atop the story saying he had died the day before.

I let the family know and they were happy that I called. On Monday, they were even happier because A) They loved the article and learned a little bit about him that they had not known and B) They essentially got a free obit in a prominent place.

 

Good idea to check on held stories. Like making sure your new car windshield doesn't leak BEFORE going to the car wash.

Don't ask me how I know.

 

By "mutual agreement", the reporter's out:

http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=45

and here:

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13107

 

So they basically told him retire or you're fired. That's BS.

 

This business never ceases to amaze me. The reporter's gone, and yet the editors whose decision it was to hold the piece still collect their paychecks. This makes no sense, which is why it shouldn't surprise me one bit. It still does, but it shouldn't.

 

It's all the reporter's fault. Has nothing to do with slow, lazy, incompetent editors. It's all the writer's fault.

TOTAL BS.

That dude should throw a lawsuit at them and hire Denny Crain and Alan Shore. They'd kick the SAExpress' Ass!!!!

 

Well, the writer bears some of the blame, his name was on the story, afterall, but shit, this is the type of thing that's going to drive me to a life of premature madness.