If you picked up the Oct. 17 edition of the Chilkat Valley News, you probably noticed that the eight-page paper was out of order – making it difficult to find where some stories began and others ended.
Further, a box on the front page teasing stories contained on the inside of the paper had a series of question marks instead of an actual page number – a prescient mistake as it turns out.
While the latter was the result of a staff error at the Chilkat Valley News, we called Petersburg Pilot publisher Orin Pierson to better understand all of the factors that led to the mixed pages.
Each week Pilot staff print the Chilkat Valley News, then load boxes of papers onto an Alaska Airlines jet which then has to get onto a Seaplanes flight in order to make it to town in a reasonable amount of time. Last week, Pierson said a number of factors led to the goof-up in the paper.
“Ultimately it traces to the Pilot production staff being short-handed that week — the publisher had to leave town for a family emergency and the longtime press assistant has retired this month,” he wrote.
One of the Pilot’s office staff stepped in to help – but it was one of her first press runs.
“In the rush of meeting deadlines, while understaffed, a crucial step of quality-checking the inside pages was not properly instructed,” he said.
The error was discovered too late for the paper to be reprinted and transported in a timely fashion. So, the Pilot is waiving the printing costs for that week’s paper.
As far as how such page shuffling can happen – Pierson explained that the edges of the printing plates get mechanically bent in order to secure them to the printing press.
“Last week, on one of the plates, the incorrect edge was bent first which resulted in it effectively being installed upside down on the press which rotated the page order of the inside pages,” he said. “[It’s] a surprisingly easy error to make, but one that should have been caught within minutes, not a day later.”
Mercifully, all of the news was included and readable. The Chilkat Valley News and Petersburg Pilot staff decided to save time and waste by coping with the misprint.
Pierson said he regrets that they did not catch the error and it has led to accelerated training for the paper’s new press assistant.
“I am still haunted myself by making a comparable error in printing the CVN around twelve years ago,” he said. “I’m already bracing myself for the next time we similarly biff it, hopefully at least twelve years from now.”