Many thanks to my pal Rita Ross from the Record’s copy desk, who showed me a wonderful typo in our Letters to the Editor (p. 9) of Monday, Aug. 2.

Written by an Elise Shapiro of Newburgh, the letter pointed out how folks around the city often “anonymously contribute to the well-being of our lives.” How true! And how awful that the letter said she’d seen her gardener working for free “on the pubic square … and stopped to say hello.” Read that again. Check the spelling of the word your brain registered as, “public.” 

Oops.

After reading that sentence — and climbing back up into my chair — my first thought was, “Yeah, I’d say hello too, if someone was working on my pubic square!”

It’s the quintessential copy-editor’s nightmare typo: dropping the “l” from “public.”

I don’t have the software to do this, but i know it exists, and I’m sure that if someone performed a concordance of words in the paper, “public” would turn out to be one of the most frequently used ones. I mean, the whole reason for our existence is to protect the public, be the watchdog of public officials, report on the use and misuse of public funds, and so on.

To be honest, I don’t think we drop the “l” often. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that would prevent poor Ms. Shapiro from clipping her otherwise perfectly lovely letter, and showing it to her grandchildren.

For the record (as it were): I don’t know who edits our Letters to the Editor, but it’s not the Night Copy Desk. (WHEW!)

Here’s a quote from a story that was published in the Record yesterday (Tuesday, July 27) about a youth-run farmers’ market that just opened on Chambers Street in Newburgh:

“It features organically grown tomatoes, eggplant, basil and mescaline mix.”

Does the New Yorker still reproduce such boo-boos? If so, i’ll have to send a tear-sheet to them.

On May 12 (Wednesday), a long piece ran in the New York Times about Newburgh’s drugs/gangs/crime/violence problems. It was quite good, for the Times — nothing that the Record’s Doyle Murphy hadn’t written 148 times in the past, but a decent summary of it all. The next day, federal, state and local cops launched a HUGE sweep here, busting into houses at 6 a.m. and arresting 78 gang members on federal charges. (i teased Doyle about it: “See? When the New York Times does a story, they get results!”) But a lot of people were upset about the “negative picture” the Times story painted of Our Fair City, and i was drafted to write a “rebuttal.” Since neither the Times (“Letters to the Editor must be 150 words or less”) nor anyone else will ever run my 750-word reply, i will paste it below, lending credence to the saying that “the power of the press belongs to those who own one.” ( i guess anyone with a blog “owns one.”) Oh: To be completely tedious, i also sent it to David Shipley, the Times Op-Ed page editor. Here it is:

May 12, 2010

Ray Rivera did a good job in these pages (“In Newburgh, Gangs and Violence Reign,” May 12) of pointing out the violence in my “dilapidated” hometown of Newburgh. I know he was taking a snapshot, not producing a travelogue. But he must have shut his eyes to many of the city’s treasures in his search for the all-too-obvious evidence of gangs, crime and drugs. Many of us are wondering how he could possibly have missed:

Washington’s Headquarters, a major tourist attraction and the nation’s first state historic site;

The Karpeles Manuscript Museum, an eccentric surprise situated in an imposing former bank;

the Ritz Theater, where Sinatra played and Lucille Ball got her start in vaudeville;

the Downing Film Center, an independent, locally-owned-and-operated movie theater showing foreign and art films;

the Dutch Reform Church, a magnificent Greek-Revival-style national historic landmark;

Downing Park, designed by the landscape architects who designed New York’s Central Park and named for their mentor, Newburgh’s Andrew Jackson Downing;

Caffe Macchiato, a Zagat-rated restaurant with European charm;

the Wherehouse, offering beers from every single microbrewery in the state, as well as pub-fare lunches and dinners; and

the plethora of first-rate Peruvian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Colombian and Italian restaurants throughout the city (plus one taco cart that was featured on the Food Network).

These are just a few attractions Rivera could have at least mentioned. But most stunning was his silence on the friendliness and kindness of the city’s residents, perhaps developed through our long years of grief, or by having to communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers. Beyond talking to one mother and one former gang member, did he not stop to even ask directions? He talked about our “narrow avenues,” but failed to say that Broadway is the widest main street in America.

By the way, he seemed baffled by Newburgh’s nickname, “The 6^th Borough.” Of course, it was never intended to refer to the city’s size or density, but rather to its ethnic and racial diversity – a fact of which we are proud.

We’re also proud of our excellent schools and thriving arts community. Newburgh Free Academy routinely sends its seniors on to Ivy League colleges and universities. NFA’s physics students win the national solar-car Race Across America just about every year, in a car they designed and built themselves. And our boys’ basketball and boys’ and girls’ track teams are our pride and joy.

The Greater Newburgh Symphony Orchestra produces a full season of concerts in the high school’s auditorium, featuring performers whose “other jobs” are with the New York Philharmonic but who choose to live in the beautiful Hudson Valley.

Has Rivera never heard of Newburgh’s ReadNex Poetry Squad? They perform their socially-conscious form of rap all over the world, and were recently welcomed by cheering youths in South America. Our homegrown band The Morning Of is starting a nationwide tour, and Perfect Thyroid plays to standing-room-only crowds.

Local artists’ paintings, drawings and sculptures are on display at many Newburgh galleries and businesses, as well as at City Hall. Book clubs and poetry and literary societies flourish here, holding regular meetings at the top-notch Newburgh Free Library, which not only serves the city and surrounding areas with its books, e-books, videos, newspapers, magazines and DVDs but also lends laptops to those who have none. The Newburgh Actors Studio puts on experimental plays and classics that the entire community enjoys.

Perhaps most importantly, we have a collection of civic-minded, good-government groups determined to eliminate the city’s raging crime problems. Among them are the Newburgh Lyceum and the newly-formed Mothers and Others and Mothers for Upward Movement.

With our deep-water port on one of the widest stretches of the Hudson River, Newburgh still has the recreational, transportation and scenic chops that inspired Henry Hudson’s first mate in 1609 to write in his journal that this would be “a pleasant place to build a town.”

“Dilapidated?” Sure, but we’re coming back! Newburgh, named an All-American City in the mid-1950s, is like a beautiful woman of whom people say, she has “good bones.” That’s the real story of our city, and future coverage should not ignore it.

(Ms.) Genie Abrams, 32 Bay View Terrace, Newburgh, N.Y.

845-569-2075 (home); 845-764-0635 (cell)

Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, whom the news media universally refer to as the “mastermind” of Islamic terrorism (and can’t we think of a better word than “mastermind”? It’s wrong on so many counts) has made me rethink my lifelong aversion to men shaving their chest hair.

I used to figure: You’re a man! That’s what men look like! So unless you’re gay, or have some other legitimate reason for being consumed with grooming, just leave it!

But Sheiky’s photo has been running in the paper a lot lately (I guess various officials are weighing in on where he should be tried, or something), and the only photo we seem to have of him — the same could be said for every other paper in the country, by the way — is that skanky-skeevy one of him in his white boat-neck T-shirt, with massive crowds of black curlies popping out of the top of it and crawling halfway up his neck. Even his face could use a shave, for that matter — he looks like a Newburgh cab driver after a 20-hour shift.

Anyway, we must’ve run that photo about 20 times in the past two weeks and, after much consequent thought about men shaving their chest hair, i’m thinking, y’know what? Go ahead.

A very belated bleat of praise to Record sports copyeditor Phil Colangelo, who came up with a great headline back on Oct. 18 after our NFL Giants, who had won several consecutive games, were beaten by the New Orleans Saints, thanks mostly to the play of their QB, Drew Brees.
The head: “Hot Brees Blows Away Giants’ Unbeaten Mark.”
G-d, I wish I’d written that.

The Record had a sweet, sweet photo of four angelic kids on Page One last week (while i was out, thank G-d). They were sitting on the curb waiting for the school bus on their first day of school. Over that photo we put a dynamic headline for a hard-news story we were running on Page Three. What’s wrong with that? Here’s what: The headline said, “4 Ulster County employees nabbed in porn-swap.” By placing that photo just below that headline, It made it look like, “…and here’s a picture of the little perverts!”

Maybe you had to see it to get how awful it was, but i bet every reader in three counties has that Page One on their refrigerators. Hilarious!

In today’s Times Herald-Record, on Page 4, we’ve run a “correction” that has to be the prize-winner. Yesterday, we ran a story by Meg Murphy about (slow news day, or what?) a sedge wren. Granted, the sedge wren is quite rare in this area, although the Cornell Lab of Ornithology lists it as among the “least endangered” species of birds nationwide. Anyway, one seems to be nesting in Montgomery, a sleepy little community 20 miles or so west of Newburgh.

It’s a tiny, dull thing, hard to find in the weeds. (The sedge wren, not Montgomery. Although, come to think of it …)

We actually ran a story about the same damn wren early this spring, when it was first sighted here. i’m not sure it was Meg who wrote that first story; can’t remember. But she was definitely all over the Wren Follow-Up. Apparently, folks from local birding clubs, having seen the first story, have been trooping out to this field in Montgomery with their binoculars to try to get a glimpse of the feathery little bastard. So anyway, near the end of this sweet little feature story, Meg was writing about a group that was tramping around looking for the wren a few days ago, and she wrote: “A pewee flycatcher dipped its way across the sky, but the wren didn’t appear … They pointed binoculars toward the brush to see a song sparrow, then a mockingbird … The group made its way along the path, spotting a woodpecker, a goldfinch … ”

So why did we “have” to run a correction? We lowly copy-editors are not told such things, and can only shudder at the magnitude of the error. But rumor is that it’s the goldfinch family that lives “along the path,” and the freaking song sparrows that live near the brush, not the other way around.

Or something like that. Leave it to a birder to know and/or care, and to call in demanding a retraction. But i wouldn’t be surprised if the Goldfinches themselves called in, outraged at being mislocated in the sparrows’ lowly neighborhood, and then the Sparrows’ attorney (a crow, no doubt) called in right after that saying his clients were shocked and sickened to find themselves wrongly listed as living near the damn Goldfinches, showoffs who flash their yellow jackets all over Montgomery and fly like drunkards and with whom they would never associate in a million years, and adding that he was prepared to file a libel suit if we didn’t run a correction immediately.

And the Record hastened to do so. Check it out for yourself.

We’re always talking about “cross-marketing,” “marketing across platforms,” etc. But it always only goes one way. The paper-paper constantly promotes our Web site, recordonline.com, but not vice-versa.

That’s crazy! Have we given up on trying to sell papers? Every single story that runs online should have an automatic tag or “stamp” that says something like, “Like this story? Read Oliver Mackson Monday through Friday in the Times Herald-Record, on sale at newsstands everywhere.”  Or, “Read it in the original! This story and much more are in Tuesday’s Times Herald-Record, on sale at newsstands throughout the Hudson Valley.” Or (especially for high-school sports stories), “Wouldn’t grandma and grampa love to see this? Buy Tuesday’s Times Herald-Record for all your family and friends. On sale at newsstands throughout the Hudson Valley.”

Or, most importantly, “Stories like this and much more, and coupons, too, are in the Times Herald-Record, on sale at newsstands everywhere. SAVE with a subscription! CLICK HERE to subscribe for a whole year, for just $x per week.”

If we don’t add a simple tag like this to our online stories, we’re not cross-marketing at all. We’re just promoting our Web site.

OK, readers: Here’s yet another chance to win fabulous prizes (similar to the prizes awarded in the “Name Sarah Palin’s Grandchild” contest, only even better!).

In today’s contest, you must correctly guess which of the following two events will happen first.  The catch is: You must submit along with your vote, the REASON for your answer. Ready? Here are your two options:

1. O.J. Simpson will find his wife’s killer.

2. The Newburgh police force will find the person who stole the $17,000 from the evidence room.

The beauty part about this contest is, of course, that ONLY TIME WILL TELL who our winners are, so you have to keep checking your local news medium (there will probably be only one left by next week, no matter where you live) for the answer. And i am thereby doing my part to save Journalism, as well as offer fabulous prizes to my readers. Good luck to all of you!

That’s right: nosocomial. Accent on the third “o.”

It means, “acquired in the hospital,” and in the early 21st-century U.S., unfortunately, it is almost always followed by the word, “infection.” No one seems to come down with “nosocomial wisdom,” or “nosocomial joy.” 

Believe it or not, we used to use “nosocomial” rather often when i wrote for “Report,” the monthly newsletter of the New York State Nurses Association. Nurses are always trying to reduce the rates of nosocomial infections by adopting various strategies that we would write about. It’s a big issue for them.

In a newspaper, of course, you would never see the word. But the other day i was editing a story with the lead, “The rate of infections picked up in hospitals seems to be going down, according to a study …”

We used the story as a “brief” — only about an inch and a half wide and 2 inches deep — and of course the headline space for it had no room for “nosocomial,” even if my judgment were bad enough to try it. Besides, i’d already written “exacerbated” in a jump-head that same night, on a story having to do, i think, with three Trump casinos filing for bankruptcy. Ten syllables is about eight more than papers usually allow, for two words.