Watching the prom season come and go

Another prom season has come and gone. The pleasure in covering this staple of the spring season is the energy and joy the teens show as they dress to the nines and take part in a formal event.

 

I had the responsibility to photograph this year’s NRHEG prom. The teens were a pleasure to work with because their event was well organized and they were respectful and attentive.

 

When it came time to prepare the newspaper pages that included my photos though, I encountered a frustration. As I put together the pages, I was referring to the printed program to get the identities of the people in each of my pictures. It usually works very well because I take a photo of every pair coming down the walkway, so all I have to do is match the list of names in the program to my sequence of pictures. This time for some reason, it wasn’t falling into place. I went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between my photos and the list, and I could tell something was wrong.

 

Eventually, the answer became clear: two couples who appeared on the program had withdrawn, so the correspondence I was relying on was not accurate. I found this out after spending a long, long time cross referencing the newspaper pages against the list. Three emails to teachers were unsuccessful in identifying the mistakes. Eventually with the help of Facebook, personal knowledge and going through every single couple and name again and again, I was able to, hopefully, fingers crossed, correctly identify all of the couples in the photos.

 

If there are mistakes, please don’t do anything other than send an email or phone call, asking us to run the photo again, correctly. I did everything short of printing the pages off and going up to the school. However, I am writing this column 10 minutes before I have to leave for an appointment.

 

Naturally, I would be very happy if we could always produce a newspaper that has no errors in it, but perhaps my story about the effort it sometimes takes to acquire accurate information shows you why we do our best, but can’t guarantee–or even hope for–one-hundred-percent success. Detail work takes time; newspaper work is a series of deadlines.

The conflict between the two is obvious.

 

Let me just say we continue to do our best, and hope you will be patient if you are inconvenienced by an error. Thank you.