It was with great interest I read this newspaper’s Aug. 17 commentary on the editorial page of this newspaper and the reader’s comments about spelling mistakes.
I come from a newspaper family and over the years worked all facets of the profession from delivering papers, working in the production/printing area, selling advertising and writing a variety of stories for various newspapers.
When I moved into the advertising and news departments I found that a proofreader was one of the most important employees of the paper. Make a mistake and when the paper was published, we heard about it or paid for it.
Two incidents stand out to me. One was a mistake and the other was not. The first was wedding information I received before the wedding took place. I did not pay close enough attention to the date and put it in a week early. The bride was not happy.
The second was a story about a well-known community leader who did not pay his payroll taxes. We picked up the story from a legal notice in the paper. He was furious when we wrote a story about it. He came in the office screaming at me (my byline was on the story). There was no mistake in that story.
The reference made by the West Hawaii Today (WHT) reader about using spell check is a good idea but spell check is not always correct. One time I wrote a story that had lots of names of local places in it. We were a twice a week newspaper and stressed news of our community, however, this story had interest statewide.
The main daily newspaper for the state picked up the same story and spell check had a hard time with the local names, many of which were American Indian. Needless to say they had to rerun the story the next day because there were so many spell check errors.
Spell check cannot replace a human proofreader and many newspapers have had to cut that position to save money in the editorial department. What a shame. A computer cannot replace the local knowledge a proofreader can have.
We can get up to the minute news from around the world with radio, television and the internet. What we cannot get is the local coverage of the Leilani Estates people feeling left out of the rebuilding plans for their community, or the story about the landowner seeking an alternate route for Kamanu Street, or the story about the child with rat lungworm disease, all of which were in the Aug. 17 issue of WHT.
We are going to need updates to these stories and more and it is going to be our local paper that will give them to us.
Then there is the advertising that lets us know about specials on cars and trucks or a financial institution that has a service that might be of interest.
I would like to know how the Hawaii County blue bike rental program is going? Or how are the water wells/pumps coming on the west side of the island? Are they all working now? How about an update on the new justice center building? Maybe some pictures to show us how our tax dollars are being put to use.
I am sure we can all think of more local stories we would like to see and our local paper is the way to get them, spelling errors and all.
Oh, and the bride whose wedding story was published early, she and her husband later divorced.
Susan T. Wehren is a resident of Kailua-Kona
