Why else are we in the newspaper business, if not to report stories where we get things right?

For me, it didn’t take even one edition as chief cook and bottle washer at this publication—a publication I’m proud to own and bring to the citizens of the Grand Valley. And you know what? I’m OK with those little mistakes, even though many might say these errors ruin my credibility. It’s hard to destroy credibility built over 25 years when those “grave errors” come down to getting a couple of names wrong.

To me, these errors actually solidify the Business Times’ reputation in another way: Admitting when we’ve screwed up is what our readers deserve. It’s also what the two people whose names we messed up deserve. As I told my old editor Phil Castle in the interview he did with me a few editions back, I believe in perfecting, not perfection. Phil came as close to perfection over 25 years as anyone I’ve seen in our media market. I can count the number of retractions on one hand and the number of misspellings and (funny) headline errors on the other.

Just like you should admit when you don’t know the answer, you should also admit when you make a mistake. As I had to with the people whose names I got wrong. I’m no Harry Truman, but the buck stops at my increasingly occupied desk. What better way to perfect what a small group of citizen journalists are striving to do at the Business Times?

Mistake one involved an organization close to my heart, HopeWest. The director of its PACE program is Dr. Heidi Marlin—not Martin. Somehow we were autocorrected from Marlin to Martin in the editing process. Lesson learned: Double-check names for autocorrection. Thanks, HopeWest, for your email. Your Marlin was swimming on our website within minutes.

Mistake number two is entirely on me. This alert came via what you (or an old game show) might call “phone a friend”—though it certainly didn’t cost me a million dollars. A friend called not to tell me I’d gotten her name wrong in the story I wrote on her new gallery, but rather her husband’s. I’ve known my friend Carlee for years. And I was so focused on spelling her name correctly (it’s not Carly) that I put her husband’s name as Lee. Too bad his name is Terry. So, my desire to get one thing right got another thing wrong.

And unless our editor is personal friends with Carlee and Terry, there’s no correction coming. Thanks for the call, Carlee, and for not letting me tarry on updating Terry’s name on the website.

In keeping with the Business Times’ duty to be transparent, I’ll make one more admission: I fully expect mistakes as we work to bring you news. We’re doing it our way, as citizen journalists. That’s right—other than osmosis from swallowing water when I was thrown into the deep end in 2000, we’re not professional journalists. Just a bunch of regular folks serving regular folks the best way we can, openly and honestly, while improving as we go.

Keep reading. We think you’ll enjoy it. More importantly, you’ll probably learn something new or different from what the professionals are telling you. We’ve always done it with profile stories, and now you can enjoy it with some investigative ones, too.

Sure, we may need to tweak things as we go, but you’ll be getting the whole story as we do.