All in all, it’s been a pretty great summer over here at Roll as we embark on our fourth year of bringing you the good stuff in the Hudson Valley: art, sustainability and creative lifestyle. Been hot enough for you lately? Once again the Rosendale Street Festival was hosted on what seemed to be the hottest day of the year. It felt almost like New Orleans in August, and that’s some kind of hot y’all. Apparently, so far this is the hottest year recorded….for the whole world. Hoo boy.
Yeah, we were feeling pretty darn good about ourselves a month or so back when we had the good fortune to talk with Pete Seeger. We had a really nice reaction to that piece, as well as to the rest of the issue. We were firing on all cylinders, everybody really working hard, doing good work. Yep, I’m gonna say it: we were on a roll.
Cue the shark music…
Last month I had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing Dr. Alan Chartock, president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio, the premiere public radio station/system in the region. I’m a big fan of Alan, and I listen frequently to shows like The Media Project and Congressional Corner, two very informative programs covering media and New York politics. Alan really knows his stuff on both counts, and to me he is a more reliable source than most regional newspapers and blogs. It was nice of him to take some time with Roll, and I think we had a great interview. He gave me lots of good answers that made my questions look better than they really were.
We put the issue together, found the cool beach painting for the cover, proofed, and wrapped it up with a bow. My, how we felt proud of ourselves, another good one! But when we got the magazines from the printer, it took literally minutes before we realized the awful truth.
We had misspelled “Chartock.” All. Through. The. Piece.
For the next 24 hours, you would have thought there had been a death in the family. We just could not believe the magnitude of the error. Alan was an extremely good sport about it, sharing a similar anecdote about how this stuff happens in the print biz. But we were seriously bummed, and there was yet distribution to be done; I was out on the street handing out my mistake for all to see. Now that’s penance.
So the question you want to ask has to be: how the hell do you make a mistake like that? I mean come on…it’s the guy’s name! Well, I have been thinking about that a lot, Dear Reader. And here’s what I’ve got.
Mistakes like these get in at the ground floor, gotta watch out. In my case, having done some online research on Alan, I cut and pasted into a file, the title of which had his name misspelled (by me), leaving off the “c.” That file sat on my desktop staring me in the face for several weeks, with the misspelling, and quite frankly I became immune to seeing it as incorrect. That’s how easy it is on my end to screw up.
It’s really important to not allow a bad habit to form, to be vigilant about accuracy in information from the start. It’s too easy to get used to the error, and in doing so get everybody else used to it. (Hey, this could just as accurately describe the recent Shirley Sherrod debacle, but I digress.) For our part, this was a wake-up call to tighten up and do this job better. And we will. We would like to be held to a higher standard, and meet it.
So, may I present the August issue! Be sure to check out our highlight sections this month: lots of great music and theatre: Bard SummerScape, Belleayre Music Festival, the new Hudson Valley Green Festival, Phoenicia Festival of the Voice, and the Saugerties Artists Studio Tour. If it’s too hot to go outside, stay in with iced tea and Roll. And if you are outside, a Roll magazine makes a real handy fan. Just the right size!
Cheers, Ross Rice
Editor, Roll Magazine
[top]
