Making a Mistake Pay

True to its annual custom, the Miami News (circ. 149,269) put together its seasonal hurricane feature with the standard warnings about venturing into the wind, the usual list of provisions for the pantry, some familiar reminiscences of the big hurricane of 1926--and a two-page color map on which the reader could plot the course of the big blows. It was old stuff to the men in the city room; no one paid much attention. When the early printed Sunday magazine came off the press, Chief Photographer Ed Pierce looked at the map and, musing about his vacation, closed his eyes and stabbed with a pencil. There was his spot: West Virginia. Then Photographer Pierce discovered that he had, indeed, made a stab in the dark. On the News map, West Virginia was where Kentucky should be.

Alerted by Pierce's pencil, the editors found that their map had somehow lost its bearings entirely. Missouri was where Arkansas should be; West Virginia was labeled Maryland; New Jersey displaced Delaware; Costa Rica had swallowed up Panama. A staff artist had slapped the map together with little care and editors had approved it with less attention. The News was faced with a problem that haunts many an editor: a serious error in an early run section.

Earning his spurs as newly appointed editor of the News, William Baggs, longtime columnist for the paper, turned failure into feature. When the Sunday news section came off the press last week, a Page One box proclaimed: YOU CAN GET CASH BECAUSE WE ERRED. Underneath, the News admitted that the map in that day's magazine section was all wrong, offered the reader who sent in the "largest number of correct corrections" a $50 award. Total number of replies, 1,014, largest number of corrections offered, 79.

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