Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for March 17th, 2009

Jim’s big, broad wings

1 comment March 17th, 2009

Jim Powers knows how to make friends. The instruction sheet is simple: To have friends, be one. It’s the doing that’s so darn hard.

Last night at Rockford city council meeting, aldermen honorarily renamed Huffman Boulevard for Jim: Col. Ret. Jim Powers Parkway. (Here’s our story just posted to rrstar.com by veteran reporter Chris Green.) Renaming the street is cool, but it’s little more than an asterisk on the back story — a story that started with a handful of Jim’s friends, including Mike Diventi and John Gile, wanting to do something to honor this “citizen servant” and spread to what has become a connecting of the dots among those Jim touches almost every day. He is a model for being a friend.

Jim Powers was one of my e-mail “pen pals.” For years before e-mail was the way to do business, Jim and I shared the occasional note. He has always been eager to befriend, to teach, to encourage. He is one of the few people who actually knows how to constructively criticize. It was Jim who sparked my interest in creating neighborhood networks via the Web. I still have Jim’s passionate business plan in a folder awaiting the time when technology will allow me and rrstar.com to accomplish what Jim dreamed about a decade ago.

As Mike and Jim’s closest friends planned this street renaming — in secret I should add — they included me in their e-mail strings. One thing came crystal clear as I sifted through the dozens of names on the e-mail strings: They read like a who’s who of titled people, elected people, little people, old people and young ones.

I suspect most of us on those strings know at least OF each other. What we probably did not know until now was that we all have Jim Powers in common. Those are pretty darn broad wings, Jim. Hugs!

NCAA brackets: Factually accurate, but …

Add comment March 17th, 2009

The NCAA brackets we ran Monday were incorrect. The ones we ran today were accurate — which makes my blog post of earlier inaccurate because I said today’s brackets were wrong, but they’re not.

Confused? Yep. I promised to explain, so here goes: Today’s brackets contain all the right teams in the right order and if you play them out, the brackets get you to the Final Four and the championship just fine.

However, they don’t look like the brackets you’ve used pretty much every year since forever. We created a different format to make it easier to read and fit on the page. Yeah, our brackets accomplished both of those things, but we also confused the heck out of some readers.

As I told our folks: It’s like reaching for the cold water faucet. It’s always on the right, so even if I can get cold water out of the left hand faucet, it’s confusing.

Our hearts were in the right place; our heads not so much this time. If it’s not broken, we didn’t need to fix it. We’ll use the old, tried-and-true brackets tomorrow.

The brackets are wrong — AGAIN

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No, I do not know what happened. Yes, I will. And, yes, I will share. But, for now, know this: For the second day in a row, we screwed up the NCAA brackets.

It was bad enough that we published the wrong ones on Monday. Trust me when I tell you that it was not a nice day for several newsroom staffers. We don’t set out to make mistakes, but they can and do happen. We have to fix them and move on. That’s what we did. Or so we thought.

This morning when they were wrong AGAIN, all bets are off. I am embarrassed, and I apologize for our failure to get it right. We’ll have the corrected brackets online shortly.