Thursday

editorial (in)accuracy

As the online producer at WBIR, I am in charge of making sure the writing in our online news stories is accurate. I try my best, but sometimes I mess up...like yesterday.


One of our reporters did a story on a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer who accidentally shot himself in the leg (I am happy to report that he is apparently going to make a full recovery).


When I edited that story yesterday, I thought it was weird that the officer's supervisor was quoted as saying that the accident happened while the cop was "re-moistening" his gun. But I figured, "Hey, I don't know much about guns. This must be some gun thing - like you have to wet them down periodically." So I left that (non) word in.

So today I had, like, 100 people call me to ask what the heck "re-moistening" a gun is. It turns out it was supposed to say "re-holstering," but when the reporter spellchecked her story before giving it to me to edit, the spellchecker changed it. And since I thought this was a gun thing, I left "re-moistening" in the story.


I felt pretty silly



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Spell check is the beginning of the downfall of writers. Don't trust the spell check, Katie!
I'm the kind of person who would have HAD to find out what re-moistening meant before I put it in an article, too. :)