Oops

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but we got some good news a couple of weeks ago in the Independent office. Seems the National Newspaper Association, as part of its annual better newspaper contest, has decided our little paper is worthy of some recognition.
The Independent has won a general excellence award, though we won't know whether we took first, second or third until the NNA convention next month. We also took first place in our circulation category in the category of best editorial page, something that has become something of a tradition for us in both state and national competitions.
I mention this in part because we're pretty proud of the awards. Add in the general excellence award won by the Rosemount Town Pages, the other newspaper we publish with the same staff from our office in Farmington, and we took two of the three top awards in our circulation category. Throw in the awards the Rosemount paper won for design and local news coverage and the award I won for a feature story on a Rosemount triathlete and we're feeling a little bit like Lance Armstrong must have when he was winning all those Tours de France. Only, without the possibility of turning our success into opportunities to date a bunch of celebrities. And without anybody accusing us of using performance enhancing drugs.
Mostly, though, I bring up the subject of awards because these are the kinds of things I want you to keep in mind when I make small, hardly noticeable mistakes like, say, running the same column in this space two weeks in a row.
Granted, this isn't the kind of error the casual reader is going to pick up. You'd have to be a pretty attentive, pretty dedicated fan of this column to pick up on something so subtle as an entire column running word-for-word the same two straight weeks (Hello, family members.).
In my defense, the headlines were different each week.
What you should have gotten in this space last week was an hilarious column about how stupid contraptions called "Pedal Pubs" are. If you really want to see it you can catch it on the Independent blog at areavoices.com/independent. It's there along with pretty much every other column I've written over the last year or so. What you got instead was the second straight week of jokes about how confusing roundabouts are. Not that jokes about hit 80s songs aren't just as hilarious the second time around. But even the best humor needs a little time to breathe before you repeat a joke.
I'm not really sure how this happened. Things can get a little hectic around here at deadline time. But honestly, how hard is it to notice you're putting out the exact same material week after week? Are you listening, Saturday Night Live?
Then again, people keep going to see romantic comedies, so maybe it's not such a bad idea.
Maybe I'm just confused from spending too much time in roundabouts. Or from listening to too many hit 80s songs.
Whatever the reason for the mistake, there's something I think we need to keep sight of. No matter what we do from now on we can say we have the best editorial page in the country.
If you're not convinced now, just read this column again in next week's paper and I'm sure you'll change your mind.

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