Recently in Newsroom workings Category

You are the future of journalism.

That's right, take a moment to have a good look at yourself, hunched over your keyboard, your empty cereal bowl at your side, wondering if you can get away with another day's wear from those pants. No? Okay, just me then.

But anyway, look at yourself, because you are where it's at. In the words of that modern master of poetry Bryan Adams 'Everything we do, we do it for you'. So what better way to please you than to let you in on the news?

Online news is all about interactivity. The ability of readers to add their comments to a piece allows it to grow and expand in all variety of ways, for the whole worlds to see. And further than that we now ask you to send us pictures, videos and songs. The news is yours to own and shape, but are you up to it?

In case you're worried I have compiled this simple quiz to help you answer the burning question:

ARE YOU A JOURNALIST?

1) How do you dress?

a) In a grey mac and fedora, with a little 'press' card tucked in your hat band.
b) Smartly, shirt and tie, suit jacket when required.
c) I am in every piece of clothing all the time.
d) Always naked.

2) You witness a car crash, what do you do?

a) Quickly whip out a camera and take pictures of the injured parties then try to force your way into the ambulance to get quotes.
b) Call 999 then see if you can help. When everyone is out of danger talk to witnesses and get their numbers for later.
c) I see everything, this holds as much interest to me as a fly stuck in jam.
d) Carry on chewing, stare blankly as the emergency services arrive.

3) You have to knock on the door of a family who recently lost their teenage son. The mother says she doesn't want to talk about it and is about to close the door. What do you do?

a) Shove your foot in the door and tell her you won't leave until she talks to you. Offer her a load of cash, because that makes up for a dead son.
b) Tell her you understand, give her your card and say that if she ever does want to do a tribute to her son you will be happy to help, then walk away.
c) Smite her.
d) Panic, kick the door down, run through the house into the back garden and churn up the lawn.

4) Police are hunting a serial killer on your patch, how do you approach the story?

a) The killer rings you with enigmatic clues which you refuse to pass onto the police for the sake of getting a scoop. You end up hunting down the murderer to an abandoned warehouse where you kill him yourself in a dramatic standoff.
b) Work with the police to put out descriptions of the hunted man, put out appeals with victims' families and follow the trial when he is eventually caught.
c) You know who the murderer is, but it is his free will to kill, so you don't interfere.
d) You sit down - it looks like rain.

5) You are sent photos of a top celebrity caught having sex with a cow. The celebrities agent rings up saying their client is suicidal and will kill himself if you run the story. What do you do?

a) Splash the pictures all over the front page - the suicide will make a nice follow-up story.
b) Agree not to publish the pictures but ask the agent for exclusive interviewing rights in return.
c) You knew about it already - you see all.
d) You feel funny and you can't sit down any more.

6) You suspect your local mayor is an international drug dealer. What do you do?

a) Your paper funds you to follow the mayor around the world, where you stay in the best hotels, gathering evidence. Eventually he realises you are on his tail and you get embroiled in a savage gun battle at the dock of a Colombian drug-dealers hideout. You escape by leaping into the water as conveniently placed barrels of fuel explode around you.
b) You gather as much evidence as possible from your office and take it to the police, asking for exclusive inside information on the story as a reward for your help.
c) You unleash a series of plagues upon the town, including a rain of badgers, little mould patches on all the bread and the disappearance of everyone's left shoe.
d) You follow your brothers happily into the back of the truck driven by the nice man in the white hat and apron. You wonder where you're going - on a nice adventure perhaps? Or to the seaside?

So, how did you do? Check your answers below to find out:

Mostly As - you are Hollywood's unbelievably ridiculous portrayal of a journalist. You wouldn't last five minutes in the real world of reporting, you're probably better off going in search of the lost island of dinosaurs.

Mostly Bs - Congratulations! You are well on your way to becoming a real journalist. Now you just need to develop a healthy aversion to money.

Mostly Cs - You are God. Please don't smite me, I've been good (that doesn't count - I had had a long day and that tree has been threatening to fall over for months, how was I supposed to know about the flamingo enclosure?).

Mostly Ds - You are a cow. Admittedly a very intelligent cow who can somehow read, has wi-fi access and can operate a keyboard and mouse with hooves. But you are a cow nonetheless and unfortunately there's not many openings for farmyard animals in print journalism, try television.

Mostly Es - You've been doing the wrong quiz. Even the cow was more intelligent than you.

One of the greatest fear of the journalist is to suddenly find yourself in a headlock under the long arm of the law.

We are happy to sit smugly in the court press box with our notepads, watching a procession of the criminal underclass get their comeuppance. But the moment it is even suggested our seat could be shifted to the dock while an unhappy restaurant owner's lawyer draws big red circles around errors in your copy, we suddenly develop a fearsome aversion to the entire judicial process.

The smallest mistake or improper suggestion can cost a publication hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel damages (for a recent example see everyone's favourite orgy-lover Max Mosley - just don't mention the war).

So how do we avoid being dragged through the courts by outraged celebs and business owners? The simplest answer, and one I subscribe to where possible, is don't make stuff up. If you can't verify something then don't print it, simple. Not only does it save you a small fortune in lawyers' fees, but it will also mean your publication maintains a reputation for accurate and truthful news.

But what if you hear something that is an absolute dynamite story, but you can't prove it? The day was (and I wasn't actually in journalism on this day, but I've heard talk) when such a story would be dropped and the journalist would return to his desk (there were no female reporters on that day - it was a man's world), head hung, to begin work on a story about how some crackpot scientist has predicted people will be able to carry phones around with them in the future.

Then some forward-thinking hack, a journalistic Einstein, one who undoubtedly is among the few figures of our generation to earn the epithet 'genius', came up with a solution which would save us ever having to worry about nasty old libel again. This divine device is known by many names but seems to most commonly appear under the title 'wicked whispers'.

You know the type of thing I'm talking about - short pieces that start with things like 'which boyband member...' or 'which soap star...' and go on to detail some outrageous celebrity behaviour which, if directly attributed to an individual would see the publication up before the bar faster than you can say "massive out of court settlement."

But have no fear loveable tabloid editors. For with no identification there can be no libel and the company lawyers can remain happily in their offices focusing on ways to lay off employees without the costly bother of a redundancy payout.

Of course there is one potential snag in this otherwise infallible device, and I feel like a ghastly pedant in even mentioning it, but if the story doesn't identify anyone and is therefore not traceable to any source couldn't it just be made up? Just a thought.

Who is interesting?

It's a good rule of thumb that things which have to be introduced as interesting are normally incredibly dull. The conversational gambit of "Interesting story..." is nearly always a prelude to a tale guaranteed to have similar sedative effects to drinking a litre of absinthe while wrapped in a kingsize duvet.

But therein lies the rub - the narrator clearly feels the story is interesting enough not only to recount, but to actually flag up the fact at the beginning. Who am I to say that a detailed explanation of how the protagonist cleverly avoided heavy traffic on the M1 last Sunday by driving on 'a little detour he knows' is dull? How can I say that my standards are correct when I will happily spend an evening discussing which is Brian Wilson's best Beach Boys composition?

Normally what we find interesting and what we don't does nothing more than govern the lengths we're willing to go to to avoid ending up stuck chatting to a man called Fotherington, about the impact of the credit crunch on overseas investment accounts. But as a journalist we have to decide what we think will be interesting for other people because, after all, if they are not interested in what we write they simply won't read it.

The interests of the readership will dictate the order in which stories are published in a paper, which to an outsider can seem totally illogical. For example, the average person across the UK is probably more likely to be interested to read about someone being mugged by hoodies than flats being built in Harrow town centre, but if you consider our readership there really is no competition as to which would make the front page (unless the mugging victim is someone famous such as Pat Sharp).

So as a newspaper survival is absolutely dependent on knowing who your readers are and what they are interested in. It is with this in mind that many national newspapers are beginning to make me really despair over the state of the national psyche.

The best example of this recently was in one of the free commuter papers a couple of days ago (I can't remember which, but it was probably in all of them anyway) which dedicated an entire half page to a photograph of David Walliams chatting to Jude Law after the pair bumped into each other on the street. There was no mention of what the two were actually talking about, we were just supposed to be unquestioningly interested in the occurrence of the event itself.

Now as far as I can see there are three possible explanations for this sort of news:

- Celebrities have developed different metabolisms to the rest of us mere mortals and they must constantly be in the public eye or they will shrink and grow antlers.

- The general public are genuinely interested in the minutia of the lives of people, some of whom are merely famous for being famous, and however inane, pointless or inconsequential their activities the average reader will lap it up with gay abandon.

- The British press has become so patronising and caught up in itself it believes the above to be true.

Sad as it is I sincerely hope it is the third option which is true and not the second, as this would truly be a miserable indictment of our society.

I'm not saying I'm above reading celebrity news, I obviously looked at the picture of Walliams and Law, but I could think of at least ten news stories that day which I found a lot more interesting and which could easily have been put in its place.

Anyway, if you've read this far thanks, I hope you've found it interesting and just so you know - my vote goes for God Only Knows every time.

I'm shattered today.

This may be because this is my first day back from a two week holiday (I invoke bloggers' bragging rights for that mention, but I promise no tedious traveler's tales).

More likely an explanation for my red-eyed Monday yawning is that I stayed up last night watching a horror movie.

This was no average horror movie - there were no globulous monsters enveloping screaming fraternity girls, or a hairy Lon Chaney baring teeth resembling a miniature porcelain alps - the horror here was in the mind.

As I supped my warm cocoa and hid cringing behind my Transformers duvet (Optimus Prime on one side Megatron on the other - you decide) a nightmarish vision unfurled on the screen in front of me.

Okay, by now I know you're thinking I'm leading you down the garden path, cunningly attempting to make you believe I was watching a nasty slasher flick only to whip back the curtain (I don't know why there's a curtain in the garden, maybe the tulips are shy) to reveal a childish flick called something like "The Fluffy Bunny Wunnies Visit Cuddle Land", and thus hilarity ensues.

But no, the film in question, Shattered Glass, genuinely did cause me to break out in a cold sweat, if only because the very concept was such a horrific one for any journalist to witness.

The plot follows the true story of The New Republic reporter Stephen Glass, who between 1995-1998 repeatedly fabricated quotes, and in some case whole stories, until his lies were eventually unwound by a rival publication.

Now every journalist, no matter how good, knows the horrible stomach-turning feeling that you have when it turns out an important fact in a story is wrong.

Normally this will be due to an error beginning with one of your sources - there is always a certain amount of trust you have to place in people like councillors or the police, but even such lofty bodies will make the occassional boob.

However, in Glass's case the errors were entirely his own fabrication, so, unsettling as it felt to watch his stories unwind, I had little sympathy for the young chancer.

The real horror was in watching his editor realise the real magnitude of Glass's journalistic crimes.

Editors must place an incredible amount of trust in their reporters - if someone decides to sue a paper it is the editor who is directly in the firing line.

Much as certain facts such as road names or dates can often be checked independently, the accuracy of crucial points such as descriptions or quotes has to be trusted entirely to the reporter.

I should quickly point out this is not a problem here in Harrow (all our reporters have the ability to make their eyes swirl while they hypnotically hiss "Trussst in me"), but just watching a depiction of an editor coming to the realisation that he had a rogue reporter on his hands was enough to send shivers down my spine.

I have written on the subject of accuracy before, but I don't think I can emphasize enough the importance of it, and just plain fabricating stories in unforgivable in the world of reporting.

Admittedly there is a certain pressure to find the big scoops and the articles which will draw the public's attention, but making them up negates the whole idea of news and turns any newspaper into a potential work of fiction.

Readers must also form a bond of trust with journalists and a publication, and they have every right to believe that what they read is truthful, whatever their opinion on the matter.

Nothing is more damaging in any relationship than finding out you've been lied to by someone you have trusted and in the case of a paper and its readers this relationship can be near impossible to rebuild.

So there it is, an insight into the journalist's second-worst nightmare, falling just behind attempting to run through a swamp filled with caramel while being chased by a 50ft chief executive in a mini-skirt who is set on draining your blood to serve to shareholders at their annual meeting.

Lucky it's all just a dream eh?

Let's take a moment here and be silly.

In fact why just a moment? Why not a minute? Or an hour? A week? To hell with it - it's time to go the whole hog and have a silly season.

This is clearly the path of thought which great media minds of yore stumbled along as they enjoyed a convivial pint in a Fleet Street boozer on a lazy early Summer day. It was probably the start of the same drinking session which led to a national newspaper thinking it was a jolly lark to put ubbs on page 3, but that's another story.

We are deeply embedded in the silly season at the moment, with schools on holiday and Gordon browning himself on a beach (geddit?) we have to look to more unusual sources of news.

It seems that the bizarre is coming to us however, as we have had a spate of bizarre animals bothering the people of Brent. This week started with a lady calling in saying there was a large African parrot in her garden refusing to come down from its tree (the parrot that is, not the lady, I think she was calling from her house, though it could have been a treehouse, you should never assume).

After our reporter Tom Lawrence had discussed the finer points of parrot etiquette (apparently it's impolite to call them Polly on first meeting) the lady revealed she did not wish to have her name in print and the story crumbled around our ears. You would be amazed how often this happens, but if you think about it if we wrote stories with anonymous people in them we could make up any old nonsense (for a good example of this see those columns in more low-brow papers which begin with things like: "Which boy band star has a second nose growing out of his armpit?,,,").

Having been left distinctly dejected by the loss of our squawking story spirits were only raised by the appearance of a reptilian member of the menagerie which is clearly loose on Brent's streets. As he prepared to head off to work on Monday morning Aqeel Bashir was confronted by a rather nasty looking serpent slithering around his hallway.

In my books this is the time to run far far away, all the way to Australia if you can manage it (where apparently they don't have any snakes), and write your house of as an unfortunate loss. However Aqeel and his mum chose the other option and chased their viperous visitor into a bucket before calling for help.

This obviously makes a cracking story, but it does make me wonder what we're going to have discovered next. A lion in the loo? A walrus in the washing machine? Maybe a bonobo in the bedroom (okay, I'll stop now). Whatever the next P T Barnhamesque offering I await it with anticipation and long may the silliness continue.

As an interesting footnote, as our erstwhile Mr Lawrence concluded his interview with Aqeel he happened to mention that his was not the only tropical animal to turn up in the borough this week only to be met with the reply: "Oh really? My mate lost a parrot the other day..."

You have nothing to fear except fear itself.

At least that's what we are led to believe in Harrow.

As the borough's police are so keen to remind us we rank highly amongst the safest places in London (we used to be number one but a few enterprising crooks soon put a stop to that). Obviously this is safety in terms of police crime figures, not the number of people injured in falling piano accidents or subjected to octopus attacks, I'm not sure who keeps the figures for that sort of thing.

But what do you do if your job is tackling crime and there's not a lot of it about (at least not the kind that will get you in trouble with bean counters in Whitehall)? Simple - you go after fear.

Fear of crime is actually a tangible target for modern police and regularly appears on their lists of priorities which need addressing in the borough. I'm not sure exactly how you measure this, I assume with surveys which ask questions such as:

Do you think crime in Harrow is:

a) Less scary than a kitten sneezing.
b) Scarier than the 1960s Batman but less scary than the Dark Knight.
c) Scarier than having to deliver a speech to the Oxford student union while only wearing y-fronts but less scary than waking up married to Amy Winehouse.
d) Scarier than finding out Noel's House Party is returning to our screens?

Whatever the case one of the worse offenders police big wigs (and subsequently big helmets) have identified as causing said fear of crime to rise is us, the humble press.

The problem is real crime, when it happens, is terrifying, but it is also compellingly interesting. This is a basic fact of human nature, and feel free to deny your place in the gene pool, but your average member of the public (and I include myself in this) wants to know what has happened if vans full of cops in lab coats turn up in their street and start turning the place into a spider's web of police tape.

Our job is to tell people what has happened and present the facts in a non-alarmist way. Unfortunately the facts themselves often are alarming, and that's where we can come under fire.

Imagine a chap dressed as a samurai starts racing around the streets of Harrow turning shoppers into sushi with a sword. Now, this is unpleasant, and you may find yourself thinking twice before nipping out to Marks & Spencer for a couple of weeks, but if you picked up the Harrow Observer and our front page story was 'Happy rabbits frolick on the Hill', with no mention of the rampant swordsman, you would wonder what on earth we were playing at calling ourselves a newspaper.

In the end unfortunately it's not the news which is scary, it's crime which people are afraid of, and there really is no way of changing that (if you did achieve this you would end up with a very bizarre world). That said, you should always try to keep in perspective that for every poor victim who makes it onto the front page there are millions of people out there who will never suffer at the hands of criminals. Remember, don't have nightmares.

As a dedicated public transport user one of my pet hates is people conducting conversations on their mobile phones.
I have no real complaint with the noise, unless the chatterer in question is Brian Blessed this will normally be of a reasonable volume, it's not being able to hear the other side of the conversation which gets my elephant (I used to have a goat but that was got too many times in the past - it's trickier to get an elephant).
The thing is I am nosey as hell, and if I have to sit opposite some one-woman knitting circle whose entire side of the dialogue seems to consist of repeating the phrase "she never", then the least she could do is take some time to explain to me what it was Bradley did at the party which has led Sharon to call her engagement off and why everyone thinks Jane's baby looks like a peanut but are all too polite to tell her.
This nosiness is something I believe I share with many of my colleagues, as the beauty of being a journalist is it is a free ticket to pry into people's lives.
As a journalist you can live vicariously through the dozens of people you speak to everyday, questioning them on their opinions, their lifestyles and often the life-changing events they have been through.
I have noticed that very few reporters develop skills outside work after taking up the job.
I'm not saying reporters are talentless, it's just that often they have one degree of separation from a talent.
For example, I can't play the drums, speak Cantonese or fly planes, but I bet if it was needed for a story I could find people who could do all these things with a quick flick through my contact book.
Being a reporter gives you the opportunity to dip into all these lifestyles and our skill is communicating this taster to the reader.
It is our job to ask the questions everyone wants to ask but are too British to pipe up with.
So, just so you know, apparently Bradley "told Sharon's mum's mate Mel that his mate Gary had called Sharon's best friend Tina fat and now Sharon won't have that man at her wedding."

If most careers have a greasy ladder which you must climb then journalism has an ice cliff which must be navigated using only your teeth.
The problem is there are swarms of people who sign up to the hollywood image of reporting, where seasoned hacks spend weeks working on one story, going undercover with the mob, bedding beautiful blonde femme fatales and eventually bringing down the corrupt government.
This means that once you do get a toothhold on the journalism cliff there is a constant stream of keen hopefuls snapping at your heels, ready to jump into your grave if you fall.
However this does have a plus side - this pool of enthusiastic hopefuls provides an unending resource of free labour for newsrooms across the country, under the guise of work experience.
At the Observer we have a near constant stream of work experienceys at our disposal, most of whom come in for a week.
It always surprises me the variety of quality in the hopefuls who come shuffling through our door.
The best ones are quick on the uptake, ask for things to do, listen to advice and get on with things (and make tea without having to be asked).
Occasionally however you get a candidate who I find it hard to believe dressed themselves in the morning, and often look like they did so in the dark.
The very worst just sit in their chair like Banquo's ghost, just staring into their computer screen and practically jumping under the desk if the phone rings.
Some of the things I have seen work experienceys get up to in the past absolutely beggar belief.
We had a chap in once who spent hours emphatically sighing and stretching in his chair like a cat, while achieving absolutely zero work for five whole days.
We started sending him out the office to "look for stories" just so we didn't have to watch his bizarre chair yoga routine all day.
Another young lady went out to fetch a paper from the newsagents ten minutes from our office and arrived back two hours later having "got lost".
I don't mind if work experienceys struggle writing stories or if they ask a million questions because they are unsure what they need to do, these are all things which need to be learned and that's the point of doing the placement. But a lack of enthusiasm is unforgivable.
Yes, you're not being paid to be here, yes, you're being given all the jobs no one wants to do and yes, I will have sugar in my tea, but this is the career you and a million other people want and if you want to beat those other million you are going to have to make the effort.
It may seem harsh but if you make an impression you will be the first person people are looking to if a job comes up in the newsroom so it depresses me when people don't give this opportunity their all.
In the end we have all done our share of work experience and it is always important to remember what it's like when you're at the bottom of the cliff looking up.

Suspicion is an important trait for journalists.
It is always vital to remember that for most people who are speaking to you voluntarily there is normally an angle from which they will be benefiting.
This may be the unemployed mother-of-three who is telling you about the terrible conditions of her council house because secretly she just wants to be moved away from her neighbour, or the local councillor who tips you off about a problem in the borough because it reflects badly on the opposition party.
With both these cases it is possible to see and understand the complainants motivation, yet still make an interesting yet balanced story by exploring both sides.
The most obvious people with agendas are press officers. Quite simply, they are paid to promote good news and limit the damage on bad.
There is an almost spiteful prejudice towards PR in journalism and, whatever seasoned hacks may say, a lot of it is born out of snobbery.
I have not known the supposed "halcyon days" of journalism which the portly red-faced survivors of Fleet Street harp on about at any given opportunity. In these days supposedly no organisations had press officers, you could spend four hours at lunch time in the pub with the head of the Met Police DCI Gene Hunt and pigs flew in the window and dropped stories on your desk as you sat in an alcoholic stupor waiting for the internet to be invented.
Since I started my career everyone from the Mayor of London to the local birdspotting club has had someone who handles their press. As a journalist it can at times be very frustrating to have access to organisations restricted to a small team of employees and there is nothing more infuriating than turning up at the scene of a police incident only to be told by PCs on the cordon that you will have to contact the press office to find out what is going on. But what journalists so often fail to realise is how intimidating it can be to be approached and quizzed on a subject by someone who is recording all your words and will probably reproduce them to be read by thousands of others.
Even writing this blog I have time to pick my words carefully, edit and reedit it and I know it will not be spun out of context, because I'm the one publishing it. If someone rang me up and asked me to give my opinion out of the blue and they would write it all down I'm sure this would just be an incoherent mass of drivel (even more so than it is now), which would invariably include something which would get me fired.
Press officers are there to make sure your average worker doesn't have to deal with the unfamiliar world of journalism and a good one can often be more of a help than a hindrance.
But before I get a host of mocking emails from my colleagues claiming I have 'gone to the dark side' I will end this entry with my top five things a bad press officer can do which make me so angry I want to swear in front of nuns:

5) Send out press releases without a single word of real English, filled to the brim with meaningless phrases like "transgenerational partnership".
4) Ask me when my deadline is then completely fail to get any kind of response in time and not even have the courtesy to phone.
3) Provide a quote but refuse to attribute it to anyone except a faceless spokesperson - if 99-year-old Mrs Biddleswaite has had the courage to give us her name when complaining about the poor service she received in a supermarket then the international chain which runs said store could have the decency to scrape up a real employee to apologise on its behalf.
2) Ring me up with a story that has no relevance at all to the area we cover then reveal they are clearly completely ignorant of what kind of publication we are.
1) And worst of all crimes - try to tell me that something I'm enquiring about "really isn't a story" and maybe I should just drop it. When you run the paper you can decide what stories are done and which ones aren't, until then just answer my question like you're paid to. Grrrr... I hope I don't pass any nunneries on the way home.

To err is human, to spell check is divine. Admittedly this may not be the traditional form of this idiom, but I wish I had paid it some heed last week.
For reporters accuracy must be paramount, you can write the most interesting story in the world, but if the details are incorrect it will sweep the very foundations out from under it.
Last week battle lines were somewhat drawn up after I raised the hackles of our rival publication with one of my earlier entries regarding us scooping them on the website. Unfortunately there is nothing more self-indulgent and frankly boring than a petty dispute brought into the public domain, so I will extend the olive branch of peace here and now, but one very good point was raised by my nameless rival.
It may seem pedantic to some to focus on the fact that we spelt the word 'occasion' wrong in our coverage of a story, but this genuinely is a serious crime in journalism.
If a reporter cannot be accurate in the words he or she writes then how can they be trusted to be accurate in the facts they present to a reader?
News is often extremely sensitive for those involved and there have been several occasions (carefully spell checked) when I have been acting in an editorial capacity and people have rung me angry with a story.
Most common of these complaints is petty criminals, many of whom will be angry when their court case is covered for all the world to see. I firmly believe that if people do not want the world to know what they have been up to they shouldn't be breaking the law in the first place, and furthermore a trial is, generally, open to the public and therefore a matter of public record, which we have every right to report.
This is a fairly standard opinion amongst journalist and I am confident in presenting it to aforementioned complainers. However, if we have made an error in the story, such as spelling a name wrong or attributing the wrong age to someone, it completely undermines the argument. Simple mistakes such as that call into question all the other facts in the article and are indefensible.
Now I'm not saying mistakes won't happen, and I would prefer if you didn't go rifling through all your copies of the Observer (or even this blog) with a red marker pen and a dictionary, but it is our job to make sure they happen as infrequently as possible. Spell checks are a start, but nothing can properly replace taking time to thoroughly go over copy and make sure you're happy with what you've written.
One final thought, I've read and reread this entry and checked the spelling on every word I'm unsure of, but irony being what it is I'm sure there's a mistake in here somewhere. So congratulations to whoever spots it, but you're not getting a prize!