There were numerous unwritten rules I tried to live by for decades as a reporter and editor. 

One of the most important was that the closer you get to deadline, the more alert you need to be, because the chance of making a mistake is never greater than during those waning hours of production each week — or day, depending on where you work.

Rule No. 2 follows rule one. Mistakes will inevitably be made and, just as inevitably, caught by alert readers. When they are, contrition beats an excuse just about every time.

Actually, I learned all about deadline mistakes, and contrition for them, years before I came to the Times.

I worked for United Press International in its Richmond office while attending Richmond Professional Institute (long since VCU) in the 1960s. Journalism students were required to work somewhere in the area for a newspaper, television or radio station, or other news outlet. A little boost from college staff landed me the job at UPI, considered one of the plums. 

It was supposed to be an apprenticeship, but as occurs in most journalistic circles, apprentices are just poorly paid staff members. I manned the bureau, located in the old Hotel Richmond, solo from 5 p.m. until midnight every Friday and Saturday, writing, or rewriting, whatever was needed for the overnight cycle of news going mostly to Virginia papers. 

On this particular night in June 1968, I rewrote a story about a suspected felon’s appearance that day in federal court where he pleaded “not guilty” to a serious felony. As I was retyping the story into the perforated tape that fed the wire service’s teletype machines, I dropped the “not.” That’s called being brain dead on deadline. Teletype tape can only be read as perforated holes that represent letters and punctuation, and it’s tricky rereading what you’ve typed. But as it’s transmitted, you can read the printed version. I didn’t.

Anne and I were awakened very early the next morning with a call from Bureau Manager Chuck Flinn. Without explanation, he told me to be at the bureau office at 8 a.m. to meet with UPI’s Atlanta attorney, who was flying to Richmond as we spoke.

He wouldn’t say what I’d done, but I was bright enough to know it was bad.

The attorney explained what I already had learned in Communications Law — that I had clearly libeled the suspect. The company’s response to my egregious mistake was a correction, which I dutifully typed — and Flinn as well as the lawyer carefully read. 

UPI — and I — were fortunate that the man, subsequently convicted, had previously been convicted of several other serious felonies. He didn’t have much of a reputation to mar.

I didn’t lose that job, though it easily could have been a firing offense. Flinn and the attorney apparently agreed that it was a stupid mistake made by a 22-year-old working late at night without an editor. In fact, I came to believe that UPI flew the attorney in basically to scare the hell out of me, which he dutifully did.

I had just graduated from RPI and as I walked out the college door, so did my draft deferment. I left UPI and joined the Navy the following month to satisfy Miss Katie Taliaferro, secretary of the Isle of Wight Draft Board, who assured me that if I didn’t sign up, I would be drafted within a week. 

Chuck Flinn, gentleman and coach of young journalists that he was, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation and assured me that when the Navy was finished with me, I could still find a home at UPI.

I found a home instead where Anne and I had grown up, in Isle of Wight, and never — well, almost never — regretted coming to work as a one-man news staff for one of Virginia’s smallest papers.

When I returned home, I brought my old Palm Tab Royal typewriter, which I had paid an exorbitant $50 for while still in school, an 18-inch ruler with pica and agate measurements and an old “hot type” paper weight that a printer had made for me back in 1967. I still prize both.

I also brought with me Rules No. 1 and 2, so painfully learned as a very young UPI reporter. I’d like to say I never again broke the first or didn’t have to impose the second, but that would be a lie. I still recall a few of my more illustrious mistakes, most all of them made on or near deadlines, and every one of them discovered and gleefully reported back to me by Smithfield Times readers, critics whom I cherish to this day.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.