I have a love-hate relationship with the Internet.
I love the idea that it gives us the ability to deliver news immediately to readers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
I'm still a bit startled every time a big story breaks that it was not all that long ago that news of that major story would not hit our readers until our print edition came out the next morning.
That has gone the way of the Edsel.
I live online now.
Of course, there are some dangers to that.
We work quickly - very quickly.
OK, sometimes too quickly.
Mistakes are made. And since I am often alone working here in the early-morning hours, those mistakes sometimes are published online.
Here's a little insider baseball for you when it comes to the news you are consuming online every day. It often does not go through the same editing process that other news goes through.
That's part of the tradeoff with the immediacy we have with our readers these days.
Take my blog, the Heron's Nest, for instance. No one else actually sees it before I publish it. I am usually running around with my hair on fire in these early-morning hours - which by the way are prime time for online readership (people now want to know what happened overnight the second they get up in the morning).
I am a Tweeting, Facebook posting fool. And sometimes the mistakes that slide by make me look fairly foolish.
Every morning at 6 a.m. I Tweet and post on our Facebook page a brief weather forecast for the day.
Of course, I have to do it in 140 characters for Twitter, including the link to our weather page on DelcoTimes.com.
Seems simple enough.
But as often happens, I manage to hit that 'return' key to publish the item before actually 'proofing' it.
Yesterday that proved especially problematic.
I wanted to note that it was a 'crisp' morning with 'cooler' temperatures on tap.
Unfortunately, that's not what I typed. I managed to garble it into 'crips' temperatures, and 'cooleer' conditions.
I didn't notice it until I glanced at our Facebook page and noticed the comments that were being posted by readers. Yes, that's the other thing about the online world we now toil in. It's a two-way street. Yes, we deliver information, but readers now often talk back to us.
Yesterday they were having a field day with my botched forecast. Some wondered if I was somehow offering a gang forecast with my 'crips' reference.
Others took a more pragmatic approach, simply wondering if we ever proof the material we post every day. They often offer their services as a proof reader. Here's a tip. The days of the proof reader in the news business went out with hot type. Yes, we still edit and proof the print edition. We still make mistakes. The online world is a bit of a different animal. The truth is some mornings it's a bit like being a member of the Wallenda family. You know, the famous trapeze artists. And yes, it feels very much like working without a net.
There's an old saying: Speed kills. When it comes to working online, it also sometimes thrills. At least for readers who like to point out our foibles. And yes, there are many.
Luckily, my issues are not that serious. But it is a serious reminder that readers expect the information we publish online every day to be just as accurate as the material in the print edition.
That's the challenge.
Some days we're better than others.
Yesterday was not one of them.
It's a work in progress.
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