Remember being pressed by elementary school teachers to always practice good handwriting?
Well, printing legibly never gets old — especially in the college newspaper business.
The characters “h” and “n” are identical, except for an ever-so-slight extension of the letter’s stem on the left-hand-side. To the human eye, they’re just about the same, and in handwriting, it doesn’t matter much if there is ambiguity as to which character was written.
No, this blog hasn’t yet devolved into a forum on penmanship, but this post is to address a typographical-turned-factual error on page 3.
The headline in Thursday’s print edition reads “Campus Plan hears approval.” That’s blatantly not true. The 20-year proposal is almost at the point of getting approved after more than a year in the making, but it’s not quite there yet. The headline should have read “Campus Plan nears approval.” To a reader skimming through the paper and only glancing at headlines, the information provided by that four-word phrase is wrong. And we’re sorry for it.
Several gaffes at the paper late Wednesday night, including the misreading of the correct headline (written by hand) and the lack of noticing the error, brought the mistake to print.
We at The Hatchet always strive for 100 percent accuracy in reporting the news, whether it be in the news copy itself or in the adjacent headlines, captions, graphics, etc. Therefore, when mistakes like this get through the editorial and production processes, we step back and reevaluate our fact-checking mechanisms before material goes to print.
Feel free to post any comments you have about this issue, and I’ll get back to you.