When the customer is right

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    Caban
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Editorial

Recently, I received a message of the variety most editors dread: your paper ran an article with multiple mistakes. The message and its sender will remain anonymous, not at their request, but ratherat my discretion.

The issues listed in the initial message were addressed and a corrected version of the story ran last week.

When we, as The Madill Record, make mistakes it ultimately comes back to me as the managing editor. I am ultimately responsible for the content that comprises our weekly newspaper, website and Facebook page. While we work as team to create the best articles and stories for Marshall County, the buck stops with me.

It is a responsibility I take seriously and let weigh on me.

I feel very strongly when I let you, the readers of The Madill Record down in any way. Though my tenure hasn’t been long, I have sincerely come to call Marshall County home. It has been a bit of a culture shock as I have lived in mid-sized metropolitan areas (Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City) for my whole life.

The places that make up Marshall County are small towns and have the intimacy that comes with it. It has taken time but I’m better understanding what it feels like to live close to the people whose stories I cover. The word I keep coming back to is “neighbors.”

Here in Marshall County we are all neighbors. Whether you live in Madill, Kingston, Enos or Buncombe Creek, you are Marshall County. You are also a reader of The Madill Record; be it as a longtime subscriber, someone who likes our Facebook page or a reader that buys a paper as soon as it is available at our office each Wednesday afternoon.

As a reader, you are also a customer of this newspaper. And to an extant, that means that what you say goes because without you, the audience, we as journalist become storytellers with no one left to hear our tales.

The fact is, being the local newspaper editor looks a lot different in 2019 than it did in 1989. Back then cable TV was in its infancy and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet. Our corner of the world has changed.

Times have changed and that’s okay. Change isn’t easy, but it is a big part of the human experience.

My hope is The Madill Record changes with the times to remain an integral part of the lives of our readers. We want to be a destination for local news that you can only get here. We want to be the place where you see photos of your kids playing sports and graduating high school. Sometimes we’ll cover things happening outside of Marshall County, but we’ll only do so when those things will have an impact of the people and businesses (our neighbors) in Marshall County.

Whereas no one likes to be called out for their mistakes, we at The Madill Record accept responsibility for them.

As the English poet, Alexander Pope, said in “An Essay on Criticism, Part II”, “to err is human; to forgive, divine.” And at the end of the day we are all humans.

To close, please tell us when we come up short. We cannot know that an error was made (big or small) if we remain ignorant to its existence. The staff of The Madill Record is passionate about the people and the stories of Marshall County. It wasn’t an easy lesson to learn, but we have learned over the last two months that many times the customer is right.

As the English poet, Alexander Pope, said in “An Essay on Criticism, Part II”,
to err is human; to forgive, divine.
And at the end of the day we are all humans.