“Anyone who knows Tony Chisholm knows that he’s a positive guy. Chisholm, who coaches football, boys basketball, and girls basketball at Kingston Junior High, can often be heard yelling at the students, but it’s always encouragement. And after the game, as a reporter, I try not to let him go on about how great his players are – otherwise I’d never get home in time for dinner. So, when I received two slightly steamed phone calls from Tony in the span of three weeks, I knew something was wrong. And it was. In that three weeks, I had made a couple of errors in two stories about Tony’s KJH boys’ basketball team. In the first, I said the team had lost its first game against Poulsbo; actually they had won. In the second (which ran Saturday), a pull quote (a magnified quote in the story) quoted Tony as saying We were in no position to win the game the whole time. His actual quote was: We were in position to win the game the whole time. I know, I know: you thought I was perfect. So did I. But unfortunately, I will use the old reporters’ line: Our mistakes end up in the paper. Both mistakes were the victims of all newspapers’ greatest enemy: time. As the sportswriter at the Herald, I have to sift my way through dozens of results, names, and photos. I write cutlines, overlines, pull quotes, gray boxes, and other small blocks of text to fill up the page. That’s my job, and most of the time I do it accurately. When I don’t, it’s because deadline is pressing down or I’m typing out the copy between a pair of games, and sometimes mistakes make it in, and people like Tony and his team suffer. Certainly they’re not the first victims of typos, and certainly they won’t be the last. As a reporter, I’ll rarely acknowledge mistakes in my column. Usually, with a misplaced word or a misspelled name, they’ll go on the editorial page, where they belong. But two serious mistakes about one team deserve more than a few words of apology, I decided. Hopefully they won’t be needed again. “