Here at the Southern Standard, we're just regular folks who aren't exempt from goofing up. There aren't that many of us and we all do the best we can to provide you with the greatest news and entertainment source we are capable of.

That being said, we definitely make mistakes from time to time. I wish that weren't true and we do our best to not mess up, but we're just people and, sadly, there are going to be mistakes. One thing I can promise you is when we make a mistake, we won't try to hide from it or dodge it. I believe in taking full responsibility for it, apologizing for it and asking for forgiveness. 

Since I've taken over as editor in late August, I've had to do that far more times than I'd like to. That's not to say there have been a whole lot of instances but even one is far more than I'd like. I can also promise all our mistakes are honest ones. There's no vast conspiracy or payoffs or personal vendettas behind any of our gaffes. The truth is far less exciting than any conspiracy theories some people might want to manufacture and, believe me, I've heard some doozies. 

The real reasons for any mistakes that make it to the pages of the newspaper are far more mundane and technical, be it missed emails, misunderstandings or technical issues that would bore you if I tried to explain exactly what went wrong. But I'll always be willing to if someone wants that level of detail.

There's no amount of explanations I can provide people who are going to believe what they want to believe but I can assure you I realize any mistake in the newspaper is a bad look for us and we would never make a mistake, whether it be in print or by ommission, on purpose. 

As many words as we deal with on a daily basis and as many pages as we put together while working on a strict deadline, frankly I'm proud we don't mess up more than we do. That's no excuse, it's just a reality. 

A recent mistake was a slipup on the Puzzlemania page two Fridays ago. Contrary to what you might assume, the word search is not a syndicated thing we pull in. It's something we create ourselves each week. More specifically, each week I come up with a subject matter and words myself and run them through a program to generate a word search. I also create an answer key that you never see in the newspaper. I make it for myself to have in case anyone calls to say they can't find a certain word. 

In the St. Patrick's Day edition of the Standard I gave my brain a rest from trying to come up with an original subject matter and I simply used words associated with St. Patrick's Day. I went through the usual process of generating an answer key and making the puzzle. The problem arose when, for the first time since I've been doing the Puzzlemania page, I forgot to delete the previous week's search and it ran instead of the correct one. The following week I acknowledged the mistake and tried to have some fun with the situation by making the search out of synonyms for "goofed up." 

So hopefully, you won't find many mistakes from us, but when we make them, I'll be the first to admit "we goofed up."

Standard Managing Editor Seth Wright can be reached at (931) 473-2191