Storytime

"Final Salute" was nearly twice the length of "Letting Go" and required a special section of its own. The Rocky can't often afford such commitments, but Temple is pushing to get more narratives into the paper. He's encouraged ventures such as Tina Griego's series about North High School, which alternated slices of life with more typical opinion columns, and supports a writers'-group initiative conceived by Jim Trotter, the assistant managing editor/news, who works in concert with columnist Mike Littwin. Reporters who participate work through specific projects with an eye toward improving the overall writing -- and if narrative values can be augmented, that's fine by Temple. "I think a love of storytelling is almost hard-wired into human beings," he says. "We get a satisfaction from it that's the same as some of us get from music or food."

Producing narrative journalism whets Simpson's appetite, too, particularly from a creative perspective. "We all wish we could do more, even though it's hard," he says. "It's like, be careful what you wish for."

Miner mistake: Around 10 p.m. Mountain time on January 3, channel-surfers got a chance to see cable-news stars covering a rescue attempt at a West Virginia coal mine conform to every negative stereotype about their profession. When family members declared that twelve of thirteen miners trapped by an explosion had been found alive, Fox News's Geraldo Rivera practically blubbered with joy for the better part of an hour, and miracle praisers such as CNN's Anderson Cooper and MSNBC's Rita Cosby did more showboating than anyone since Paul Robeson. In retrospect, these performances would have been enjoyably hammy had not all but one of the miners been dead.

Most newspapers cast their lot with politically doomed West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, who had confirmed the accuracy of the inaccurate reports. By the time the truth finally emerged, many error-filled editions were on the way to their destinations, giving editors from coast to coast a chance to share in the shame. Via e-mail, the Post's Moore writes: "We got 80K papers, or about half of our final edition, run with the right headline and story" -- meaning that another 80,000 or so qualified as historical fiction. Meanwhile, Temple confesses that approximately 25 percent of the Rocky's metro issues contained a headline that bellowed "They're Alive."

This banner earned the paper some national screen time. On January 4's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams introduced a story about newspaper botches with a shot of the Rocky front page, its most notorious since 2002, when Hayman fire survivor Fred Finlay shared the spotlight with his cat, Twitchy, and what looked for all the world like his bare testicle.

Another amusing Rocky glitch was recently exposed by the website RegretTheError.com. On December 22, the tab was one of three North American publications to run a jokey blurb about a pledge by China's Moon God Drinking Products Co. to pay 1,000 yuan to anyone who found an error in a day's edition of one of four Chinese newspapers "in an attempt to embarrass journalists into better writing." But what about better fact-checking? The item was marked as an "old favorite" on ThisIsTrue.com, a site overseen by Ridgway, Colorado's Randy Cassingham. It first saw print in 1995.

Someone deserves 1,000 yuan for finding that.