Working scared (b/c of mistakes)

Are you repeating old mistakes or making new ones? Perhaps there is a pattern there that requires a different approach.

Also remember, unless you are a complete disaster a good manager would much rather work with someone to see improvement than go through the hell of hiring a new person.

 

I had an editor once tell me the day he put out a perfect paper would be the day he quit. We all make mistakes. His outlook was, if you're going to make a mistake, make sure it's not in 60 point. I tried to keep that in mind whenever I put together a section or a page.

 

i am with mutant, here.

sometimes you get so bogged down in trying to make sure a story is perfect and follows the paper's style that you get behind and blow the headline or cutline.

editing is a matter of knowledge and skill, but for newspapers it is primarily time management.

you get a sense of what to look for with certain reporters and you get more used to it, but you have to have different gears for different stories and when deadline is looming.

 

One word of advice: Don't expect to see compliments for good work on the desk. Copy editors are the offensive linemen of the newsroom. No one notices you unless you screw up. The best thing that can happen as a desk guy is to be anonymous.

 

Are you sleeping well/eating right? A lot of my problems came from not sleeping well.

I'd get home after a late night of desking, stressed from it, and not want to blow off some steam. So I'd play some video games, eat some junk food, and not get to sleep when I should. Then I'd be tired the next day, so I'd make more mistakes and be even more stressed. It was a bad cycle (outside of the staying up late playing video games, which was fun).

 

I don't know the particulars of your situation, but hopefully this helps.
I had a string of headline errors last year (something like 5 in 3 months, some of which were more blatant than others). My SE, who is no longer here and who could not have been more supportive, gave me a good suggestion.
On my page proofs, he had me circle every fact, name, etc... in all of my headlines, and then circle the corresponding fact, name, etc... in the stories.
It made a world of difference.
Something else I did was simplify my headlines. Instead of saying "Team gets third straight league win," I might go with "Team comes away with third straight win."
It's a slight difference, but it saves you in case one of those wins wasn't in the league. Yeah, that one's a true story.
Anyway, hope that helps.

 

We've all been there... The problem is when you're working scared, you tend to make more mistakes...

 

I misspelled a word in 120 point type last week. Don't ask me how.

You just need to mature your expectations and your coping style. You feel so self-conscious in the early going, but as you stop making mistakes you learn to trust yourself more.

THAT'S when you fuck up in 120 point type.

Here's what you do: Get angry at yourself, figure out how it happened, learn from it if possible, put out the next day's paper with confidence like it never happened. It's the only way to stay sane when you put out a product like ours. If it's not an A-1 editor's note apology correction, never hold onto the negativity longer than it takes you to slot the next day's section.

 

Yep... when the fly ball is racing towards you, if even for a second you think you can't catch it, you won't. For me, mistakes always come in clumps..Slow down, double check, you can do it.

 

The good news is that nobody reads newspapers any more, so the only people who saw your mistake was your bosses.......

 

OUCH!!!

 

I've got three points to make to you.

One, as long as you work the desk, and as long as you work the desk with a deadline, you're going to pick up the paper the next day with the thought of, "God, I hope there's no big fuckup in there."

Hustle, that's the nature of the beast. I'm as cocky as anyone when it comes to my talents, and I do it nightly. I get mini-panic attacks on my couch at 3 a.m., wondering if I wrote a certain head right, or if I might have inserted some unintended meaning into it. Or if I had misinterpreted the sports editor's directions on something.

Dude, I do a football tab every year essentially by myself (desk-wise), with pages proofed by whoever has time to look at a few. Take that feeling I was just talking about, and multiply it by about 10 as I drive over to the press plant to pick the first tabs off the press.

Two, understand the nature of mistakes. This is one I wrestled with my SE over for 20 years, and he never got it. It might have to be enough that you get it.

Say the Devils and Canadiens are playing, and Montreal wins 2-0. You may have had the game on TV in the background, or heard somebody talk about a great play by the Devils. And you have the idea the score was 2-1 Devils. You write the scoreline as Devils 2, Canadiens 1 on the head. You write the head, "Devils/knock off/Montreal".

Error.

But here's the thing. There's every possibility you'd make that mistake 10 straight times -- because you thought what you were doing was RIGHT. Hey, if you thought it was WRONG, you wouldn't have done it like that, right?

This is why it's absolutely essential for somebody else to proof your pages, because he/she isn't going to come into it with the same preconceived notions you had. And if you're in a situation where nobody else is available to proof your pages, you have to read every headline and double-check it with the copy -- which is a HELL of a lot more work, and a HELL of a lot more brain-numbing than non-editors realize.

Three has to do with page proofing, and I am sure to piss off some of the anal-retentive copy editors of the world with this one.

My contention is this -- if you're catching a mistake on a verb tense in the 16th paragraph of a story on my page, you had BETTER catch an error in the headline. Priorities, priorities, priorities. Work from the big stuff down. Make sure the things that are going to be read the most are right first -- headlines, cutlines, readouts, quotes. Then, if you have the time, catch the little stuff.