It was a dark and stormy night…

It was a quiet morning around the newsroom table. The blazing skies of early July had given way to a welcome respite of rain showers outside the fourth-floor windows of the Review building, and the meeting was beginning to wind down when the newspaper editor made the suggestion via speaker phone.

“We need to back off of anecdotal leads ,” he said. “Every once in a while we get into these little spells where we’re seduced by the anecdotal leads.”

Police profiles

Steve Smith also commented today on the profiles of police chief candidates , noting that in today’s story , there isn’t much mention of citizen oversight, which Smith said is one of our key issues in following this process. The candidate, Roger Peterson, does, however, discuss it in his video interview.

Senior editor Carla Savalli responded that we’ve been planning a story on the oversight issue this weekend that will incorporate comments from all four candidates.

Thinking about the weather

Gary Graham* noticed that the weather forecast on page one differs from that on page A2 by three degrees (this issue was also raised via email by reader Joe Burch of Spokane). This happens because the weather graphic is produced by Accuweather, a third-party servie, and we download it early in the evening. The weather bug on the front page is produced in-house, and sometimes the designer will pull the temperature numbers off of Accuweather’s Web site if the weather graphic on A2 isn’t ready yet.

There are two ways to make those numbers consistent: Change the front page to match the weather graphic, or change the weather graphic to match the front page. The first option is the most practical, but the second option is arguably more accurate. I suggested that it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference as long as the numbers match because the temperature forecast is just an estimate with a considerable margin of error (I mean, really, are you going to go about your day differently if the forecast says 79 degrees instead of 82 degrees?). Changing the weather graphic is a possibility, but would require a good 5-10 minutes worth of time in the middle of the nightly deadline crunch, and, lacking a crystal ball or other means to predict the future, we don’t have any way of knowing for sure whether making that change will result in a more accurate forecast.

For the record, Accuweather’s Web site is now predicting a high of 83 for today (our graphic on page A2 predicts 82 and the front page says 79).

Other various embarrassments

John Stucke noticed this morning that he had inadvertantly used the word “cache” instead of “cachet” in the eighth paragraph of today’s Kaiser Aluminum story (Karen Dorn Steele also mentioned the same in this morning’s meeting). Also, opinion page editor Doug Floyd apologized profusely today to the editorial board for the math error in the infamous July 4 editorial (reprinted today with the correction). The note is posted with Floyd’s permission at Huckleberries Online .

*Note - Earlier I had reported that Jim Camden brought up the weather graphic issue. While he was involved in the conversation, the issue was first raised by Graham. I humbly apologize for the error.