Coach lives

When I was 22 and a reporter for the South Bend Tribune, all the reporters in the newsroom took obituaries before deadline. We slugged them "obit" or, for a second-day obit, the slug was "funeral notes." The assistant city editor, Mac, would stub out another cigarette and shout, "Musser! Obit on line three!"

At some point, one busy morning in 1970, I cranked another piece of copy paper into my manual typewriter, lit another cigarette, took another obit call and pounded out another slug. Only this time I shortened the slug for a funeral note to "fun note."

Now we all know that slugs only identify stories and never get into print, right? Wrong.On that day I learned one of the oldest lessons in journalism: Don't jack around with copy in a building that turns the words you write into tons of newsprint with barrels of ink. Of course, some printer neglected to take the slug off the story and some bereaved family member opened the paper that evening to see "fun note" at the top of an obit I wrote.

It happens. And it happened again in a new medium Wednesday. A web producer was training an anchor/reporter to use the KUJH web site so the reporter could cover the NCAA basketball tourney over spring break. In the training process they made up a practice headline: "Roy Williams Commits Sucide after loss to Kansas" (yes, a bad joke) and, being very careful not to hit the publish command, marked the story in the "top news" category and then (they thought) buried it deep in the web site system.

You can guess what happened next.

The story didn't actually appear on our web site -€”- where we would have noticed it immediately. Worse. Somehow (and we are still trying to figure out exactly how) the site's coding picked up the headline and automatically published it as a KUJH-TV top story on the Journalism School's web site. That's where a sharp-eyed alum noticed it and called the Dean's office to let us know that "suicide" was misspelled. (The pregnant sarcasm of that message leads me to believe the caller had been trained by John Bremner, but I don't know that for sure.)

We took the headline down so fast that we erased the electronic tracks that would have helped us understand why our backend system did what it did. But the lesson is not in better source code. It is a lesson that never changes: Don't jack around in a newsroom with fake stories. Years ago, KJHK somehow read a story on the air in which a town in Iowa disappeared in a nuclear attack. Even The Great Communicator, President Ronald Reagan, once declared he was going to bomb Russia when he thought the mics were off and the cameras weren't rolling. "Dutch," an old sportscaster himself, should have known better.

And so should we.

Still, I'd like to think Roy Williams, whose own career rides on the successes and failures of 20somethings under his training, would sort of understand. The coach lives. And he knows that those of us who work with college students, students whose performance is out there for all to see, coach not only their performance but real life lessons. The kid who made the mistake feels awful. He has learned a basic newsroom lesson. And we'll continue to coach lives as well as the basics.