I’m borrowing this excerpt from the monthly National Newspaper Association publication titled “Publisher’s Auxiliary” because it so aptly fits my column this week.

Mistakes. Albert Einstein rightly said that “anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” That is correct, but the problem newspaper folks have is that our mistakes are there in plain sight for everyone to see!

In the July 2 issue of the Courier, I made a mistake.

Well…possibly more than one, but one for sure that I want to amend. The person whose photo I ran and identified as Joyce Brestel was, in fact, not. The photo on this page is the REAL Joyce Brestel, whom we recognize as a 69-year member of Callaway’s American Legion Auxiliary - a newsworthy feat indeed.

Whenever the conversation turns to newspaper mistakes, we are prone to immediately think about typos.

The horror of a typo is exacerbated when it appears in a headline. And sadly, it’s not that rare these days to find headlines that have misspelled words, subject/ verb agreement issues, and use of the wrong word (its vs. it’s).

Newspapers don’t hold a monopoly on typos. NASA had a typo in 1962 that was expensive - to the tune of $80 million! A missing symbol in the spacecraft’s code resulted in the Mariner 1 blowing up over the Atlantic Ocean.

There are lots of stories where the word “not” was omitted in a sentence, completely changing the context of the story. Perhaps the worst case of that happening was not in a newspaper, but in the 1631 edition of the Bible. In the listing of the Ten Commandments, that edition stated, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Oops!!

Even the big names in the news industry are not immune to embarrassing mistakes. In 2015, the Associated Press reported that Yogi Bear had died. Well, it wasn’t the cartoon bear who had passed away, but New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra.

I have been a journalist for more than 20 years, and suffice it to say, I have certainly made my fair share of mistakes. I have learned the hard way that the area where mistakes have received the most “feedback” from readers is a misspelled name. Especially in sports and obituaries. I try to be SO careful with those, but every once in a while I miss one.

So here’s the thing. In this issue alone, I have typed more than 3,000 words. That’s pretty average each week. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not attempting to make excuses for my errors, but that’s a lot of words! As hard as I try, mistakes are bound to happen.

And when they do, I truly appreciate you pointing them out to me so I may correct them.

Oh, and I appreciate your grace, too.