L ast week, many of you may have noticed a white label obscuring some text right in the midst of our front page story. Right you were to notice it — that is not normal. Some of you called us up to tell us that the post office had been monkeying with our newspaper, sticking labels all over it willy-nilly. Others still were curious enough to peel off the sticker and see a confusing and strange paragraph, which, among other things, repeated the phrase "blah blah blah."

Well, here we go. Full disclosure. We admit it: we screwed up.

Whether it's apparent to our readers or not (we're hoping not), there aren't very many of us working on this newspaper, and as such, a lot of responsibility gets spread to only a few people. Tuesday nights are particularly cruel to the staff of the Ellenville Journal; that's when all our writers and editors have to work until the wee hours of the morning to ensure that Wednesday's production day goes off with as few hitches as possible, writing all the articles they've been cultivating and researching throughout the week. Sometimes news breaks so suddenly that things get shifted around, leaving our writers and editors to make sense of all of it.

Suffice it to say, it's easy to lose track of things with a schedule that packs so much work into such a short period of time. Last Tuesday was no different — an editorial suggestion going to one of our writers got lost in the shuffle of rewrites and copy-edits, and when it came time to send our edition off to the printers, we managed to miss the offending paragraph. The next day, the newspapers were printed with none the wiser to the ticking time bomb of text on our front page.

Needless to say, it was not our finest moment.

Once the mistake was realized, our team jumped into action (with only a few minutes of one of our reporters hiding under his desk, moaning and gnashing his teeth). We ran out into the streets, collecting whatever papers had been distributed, and set to work covering up the offending text with labels. Sure, we knew that it was not the most effective solution to the issue — but short of printing up an entirely new paper and coming out a day late, we were out of options. We hoped that our desperate act at fixing a gaffe would be met with a minimum of laughter at our expense, and thankfully, we were right.

All of this just goes to show you that we, like everyone else, are human. Human hands and eyes make this paper, and we do our best to make it as good as we are able. While we may not always succeed, we'd like to think we've got a pretty decent record up until now.

We'd like to extend our thanks and appreciation for supporting us through both the good times and the bad, and we hope you'll continue to read our paper the next time we stumble.

Here's hoping it's not anytime soon.

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