From Deseret News archives:
Joyous news turns tragic
We all know, now, how painfully optimistic that headline was.
Similar stories were printed in hundreds of newspapers around the world, as headline writers rejoiced over what seemed to be good news: after 41 hours, 12 of 13 trapped miners were still alive in a West Virginia coal mine. That's the news that came from family members of the miners around midnight Eastern time. And the governor of West Virginia seemed to confirm it.
It wasn't until nearly three hours later that the correct information — 12 dead miners, one survivor — was relayed to the families and to the media.
In Utah, the state's two capital-city newspapers were able to stop the presses partway through their runs. The result was that some Utahns opened their papers Wednesday morning and found the jubilant news, and others found the sadder headline that replaced it at about 1:30 a.m.
According to figures supplied by the Newspaper Agency Corp., 40,000 of the Deseret Morning News' 75,000 press run included the updated story, as did 80,000 of the Salt Lake Tribune's longer 130,000 run.
Newspaper editors around the country are now trying to explain why they printed a story that turned out not to be true.
"We go with what we know," wrote Randy Brandt, editor of the Racine, Wis., Journal Times. "In essence, news reporting — often called 'the first rough draft of history' — is just that, a rough draft. It's also a self-correcting process, and we report new information as soon as we get it."
Melanie Sill, executive editor of The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., wrote an editor's blog to readers on the paper's Web site Wednesday, noting that "there's a difference between journalistic failure and getting bad information — which I call an honest mistake."
Still, editors around the country were sorry for headlines that expressed a level of certainty that wasn't warranted. "I wish I could call back all of the editions with the mistaken headline, a grim reminder of just how short-lived some joy can be," Alan English, editor of the Shreveport Times in Louisiana, told his readers.
Deseret Morning News assistant managing editor Wendy Ogata was driving home from work just before 1 a.m. when she got a call on her cell phone from assistant sports editor Aaron Shill, who had just seen a TV update of the mining story. Ogata immediately dialed the NAC press room and said the phrase that actually happens more in movies than in real life: "Stop the presses."
