While I came here on April 1, the school year still had three months to go until my wife and son could join me. Only problem with my decision was I forgot about a Friday morning appointment in my office. To my utter embarrassment, my guests arrived to an empty office and the extemporaneous efforts of my colleagues to make excuses for the inexcusable. I introduce this bit of humble pie to underscore just how important and fragile relationships and credibility are to the job of a weekly editor who must be so close to the community. That lapse reverberates through local circles and leaves lots of people wondering just how much the editor cares.
Newspapers demand accountability all the time from public officials.
And that puts us in the glass house. We had better be equally accountable on our turf. Ironically, this meeting was with a local political party that feels the paper has not treated it fairly of all times for me to forget an appointment. But this experience also underscores another reality about the pressure-packed process of publishing a newspaper. More often than not, failures and failings by those who run the paper are more the result of human error or sloppiness than some agenda or innate bias.