Eli has an Awesome Post Describing the Pressures of News Librarianship
Eli Edwards’ internship at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is over. It seems like she’s going to write some more about it. For now, she writes about the pressure of being a news librarian:
"The idea of making a mistake that might be seen by over half a million readers was bad. The possibility of making a mistake that might keep a story from being seen by half a million readers was worse. There were times when being the person on phone duty made me almost queasy with dread."
She’s right: there’s a lot of pressure in these jobs to have speedy, accurate answers that people all over the world might read, hear, or watch. We all make mistakes sometimes. We have to accept and acknowledge that fact. How we handle those mistakes and what we do during the aftermath is very important. Refer to Shimon’s post about failure.
August 21st, 2004 at 12:59 am
On Friday one of the administrators for the Wikipedia accidentally shut down the whole site, about the 600th most popular English language site on the internet, for 20 minutes.
One backup database server was being disconnected to allow an overheating CPU to be looked at. He switched to the wrong computer, the primary database server, and typed the database shutdown command there. He realised his mistake an hour later.
That could easily have been me, but wasn’t. This time.