The The Impotence of Proofreading

This bit of stand up comedy/freestyle poetry by Taylor Mali is hilarious, but it makes copy editors and English teachers everywhere cringe. (CAUTION - This clip has some "unintentional" naughty words that might make your grandma blush if you repeat them at Easter dinner.)

Recreating the past

It's nearly 24 hours since the server crashed and we learned that our back-ups hadn't worked. I'm sitting here cobbling together whatever I can to go into the paper that we'll put out tomorrow morning, one day behind schedule. To do this I've combed through my e-mail files for submitted articles and begged photos from people who were at the same events we covered last week, all while doing my best to stay positive; not my typical outlook on life. What can I say: Sometimes bad things happen to good newspaper editors.

CRAAAAASH!!!!

At 1 a.m. today our server crashed, taking with it a week's worth of articles, photos, ads and other assorted items on press day. There is no back up in place. Nice; I know. We are trying to recover the ones and zeros that make up all the electronic information that we fill our pages with. Wish us luck.

Reaping the Rewards

The Utah Press Association held its annual winter convention over the weekend in St. George, about seven hours away from Roosevelt. Vanessa and I drove down for the awards banquet Saturday night.

I told Vanessa before we left the hotel room that I wasn't expecting much at the banquet. I was feeling good about the work our paper did in 2007, but we are in our second year of competing against papers with much larger staffs (the UPA bases its divisions on circulation numbers).

The evening went much better than expected. The Uintah Basin Standard earned 11 awards from the UPA: first place - Best News Coverage, Best General News Story, Best Feature Story, and Best Editorial; second place - Best News or Feature Series, Best Breaking News Story, Best Feature Column, and Best Front Page; third place - Best Sports Page, Best Feature Page, and Best Feature Photograph.

These awards came less than a month after our paper received the General Excellence Award for Brehm Communications Inc.'s Better Newspaper Contest. Twenty-two other weekly newspapers owned by BCI were in the running for the award, which we won based on points for each category we received awards in.

In the BCI contest the Standard brought home: first place - Best Web Page Promotion and Best Circulation Growth Idea; second place - Best Front Page, Best Editorial Writing, Best Original Photo-Sports, and Best Original Photo-Portrait; third place - Best News Presentation and Best Business Page.

The Standard also claimed third place in the Best Print Quality competition, which included all BCI-owned papers with printing facilities, and publisher Craig Ashby won the Outstanding Team Performance Award for his work with his brother, Kevin, the publisher of the neighboring Vernal Express.

I feel fortunate to have our paper recognized for the work that we do week in and week out. It's often difficult to see the quality of your work when you're on deadline, and while awards aren't what I do this for, they do make me happy that I chose to feed my news addiction.