The other day I whined about something I did wrong; now I can aggravate my carpal tunnel patting myself on the back for doing something right. It was a small detail but it’s the kind of thing that causes people to say “hey, nice catch.” Of course it was on a mundane story of absolutely no consequence … a wrapup of Fashion Week, where tons of famous people showed up at fashion shows because, well, I guess that’s one of the unfortunate obligations of the famous. Anyway: The story says one of the famous was Venus Williams and immediately I’m thinking: “Why would she be going to fashion shows when her sister’s been killed?” Then it dawned on me: The story was written before that sad bit of news broke. Our options were either mentioning the murder (absurd in a fashion roundup) or removing the Venus reference (which helped the story seem less dated). We did the latter.
Of course this brings up the be-careful-what-you-delete rule … I’m surprised now that it didn’t bite me because Murphy’s Law so inevitable: The one person you cut from the front page story will be the one pictured on the jump to fill space.
(Tomorrow’s test of will: an entire day’s posting without using a colon.)