Dear readers,
This morning, many of you were likely left scratching your heads after reading in the headline of our e-mail edition that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had won yesterday's Massachusetts Republican primary election.
That's because it was former Gov. Mitt Romney, not McCain, who won the primary.
I offer a sincere and personal apology to all of the Daily's e-mail readers who were confused or misinformed. This mistake was the result of a production error during our Internet posting process; the headline in question does not appear in our print edition.
It was no small error on the Daily's part. We hope that, as readers, you find this sort of calamity as unacceptable as we do.
I'd like to explain how the mistake came about -- and why it won't happen again.
The headline in question was written as a sample headline to help our layout editors place stories on the page before election results were in. It was a placeholder not intended for print, and it was replaced by the article's actual headline shortly after full election results became available and the piece was written.
Unfortunately it was this placeholder, rather than the paper's actual content, that was first uploaded to Tuftsdaily.com. Our online editors quickly corrected the problem on our site, but the e-mail edition had already been sent.
This marks the second time this academic year that our e-mail edition has included such an error, and we will be taking immediate steps to ensure that the problem does not happen again. For one, we will revise our Internet posting policy so that each night's e-mail edition is thoroughly reviewed by multiple editors before it is published. We also hope to increase the communication between our print and online editors so as to make such errors less likely to occur in the first place.
As Tufts' top source for campus news, it is the Daily's responsibility to ensure that all content published -- in the paper or online -- is accurate and fair. Today's error constituted a failure to meet that responsibility.
Please accept our sincere apology.
Thank you,
Matt Skibinski
Editor-in-Chiefeditor@tuftsdaily.com
