If you pick up the print version of today’s Addison Independent on the newsstand or get it in the mail, you’ll probably notice that we misspelled “Loses” in a headline on the front page. Also the caption for one photo does not seem to match the image.

Good grief!

The Corrected Front Page

Well, we had some sort of weird problem with today’s issue where we inadvertently printed unfinished versions of Pages 1A and 2A that included mistakes. On Wednesday, we laid out the pages, created PDFs of the provisional pages, printed out and proofed the pages, and then corrected mistakes (the misspelling in the headline, the wrong image and a couple other minor mistakes on the front page). After correcting them, we created new PDFs and sent those to our printer.

Our communications software clearly shows that the printer has the corrected PDFs today and we only sent them one PDF for each page last night. And yet they printed the earlier, uncorrected versions. It seems to be a technology glitch, though, honestly, we haven’t figured it out yet. If we never sent the printer the earlier versions, how did they get them? And why do they only have the corrected versions now?

The staff that puts together the Independent is only human, and we make mistakes. But we follow processes to keep to a minimum the number of mistakes that get into print. In this case, we followed the steps, and still mistakes crept in. We will continue to investigate so it doesn’t happen again.

If you are an IT expert who knows something unusual about how PDFs can change themselves without human intervention or have some other suspected explanation, drop an email to [email protected].

The electronic versions of the paper on this website are all correct; it was only the print editions that include the mistake. If we figure out what went wrong, we’ll let you know.

Thanks for reading the Addy Indy!

— John S. McCright, news editor