Calendar

Updated 1.15.2006

Let's work on making errors a thing of the past

By ALAN ROSENBERG
Journal Assistant Features Editor

It was an embarrassing moment -- an error that could easily have been prevented.

In last week's Arts section, we printed a photo of a partially masked actor who we said had played the lead in The Phantom of the Opera in 1995, the first time it came to the Providence Performing Arts Center.

My 14-year-old daughter, reading the Arts section Sunday morning, saw the photo and said it was an odd coincidence: The man in the picture had a name just one letter off from that of an actor she'd been in a show with a few weeks before. Kind of looked like him, too, though it was hard to tell with that half-mask on.

We talked about it for a moment and dismissed it: Though he's a talented performer, if he'd played the Phantom on a national tour, even a decade ago, surely she'd have heard something about it during several weeks of rehearsal.

Print an event form to send to The Providence Journal Complete guide to sending press releases to The Providence Journal

But when I got in to work on Monday, I found out that a couple of eagle-eyed readers had e-mailed to tell us that we indeed had the wrong man. A different actor had played the part, they said, and one of them still had the autographed program to prove it.

A quick check of the 1995 review showed that they were right. So how had we made the mistake? And who, exactly, was the man in the picture?

It turned out that he was a local actor who'd taken part in a press conference in 1994 to announce that Phantom was coming to PPAC the following year. When we ran the photo with an end-of-the-century look back in 1999, we'd taken the photo from our files and scanned it into our electronic photo archive with a new caption saying, erroneously, that he'd played the Phantom. And there it sat, like a little time bomb waiting to explode last Sunday.

A phone call to my daughter's acting colleague showed that he was, in fact, the man in the picture -- and that we'd run the picture, with his name misspelled, not just in 1994 and 1999, but a couple of years ago, too.

I apologized for the errors, which were definitely our fault, and he was gracious. At the same time, though, I wondered: Why hadn't he ever let us know about them?

Well, he said -- he's a most pleasant fellow -- it just hadn't occurred to him.

It made me wonder how many other mistakes are in the paper that no one thought to tell us about.

Here's another example. Folks are pretty good about letting us know when they've scheduled a show, opened an gallery or a restaurant, started a weekly dance or hired a musician for a regular gig. After all, there's an incentive for them to do so: increased sales.

But every so often, we find that a show has been canceled or a business has gone under, or hours or admission fees have changed, and a reader has showed up based on a listing we ran, only to be disappointed. No one let us know.

So here's a message to presenters and people we write about -- anybody, really, who has special knowledge about things in the paper. If we get it wrong, or if something changes -- if you go someplace in our listings and it's out of business, if you're holding a show and tickets are sold out -- please tell us. We want to make The Journal as accurate as humanly possible. And for that, we need your help.

(Hats off to those two readers who e-mailed us last Sunday about the erroneous caption, tipping us to the problem in the first place.)

If an event is canceled the day it was to be held, is it too late to tell us? Not at all. That's one of the many benefits of having a Web site, projo.com, where we can inform readers immediately.

Flood of information

We need your help, too, to get information into The Journal in the first place. The flood of information we process to create the LIVE This Weekend, Sunday Arts and Lifebeat listings has to come here in an orderly fashion, or we'd drown in last-minute work.

I know I've written about this before, but last-minute submissions seem to be increasing recently. So please bear with me as I repeat and update these tips for getting news into Arts, Lifebeat and LIVE.

Please consider this an open invitation for anybody planning an arts event in Southeastern New England. We want to hear from you.

Early. And with pictures -- color pictures, if possible.

Here are the details:

This section has a weekly feature called Calendar This Week. It's a compilation of interesting arts events for the upcoming week, created by Steve Smith. If you'd like your event considered for this feature, send Steve (stevensm@projo.com) a note two weeks beforehand.

Steve also compiles the Arts Bulletin Board that runs in this section. That's the only place we run news of auditions, classes, workshops and calls for people to enter contests or submit work for shows. Send the information to him on the same deadline as for the Calendar -- two weeks ahead.

Steve does our pop-music listings, too. If you've started booking bands at your restaurant, launched an open-mike night, or want your band's gigs to be listed so they can link up with mp3s you've put on the projo.com/music site, let him know.

Several people work on the What's Happening listings in Lifebeat, the Today listings in Arts, the Books Calendar in Thursday Lifebeat and all the listings that fill our Thursday LIVE This Weekend section. Send any listings information to What's Happening (pjfeat@projo.com) two weeks before the event and you'll hit all these bases.

There's a feature near the end of every month in Arts called Hot Tickets. It looks at what we think are the most interesting events in the region coming the following month. It's based on information that's been sent to What's Happening, so if you want to be considered for listing in it, just send that note to What's Happening early in the month before your event -- say, early October for a November event.

I keep saying "note" and "information" because I think the term "press release" often scares people who don't think they know how to write one. All we need are the facts: What the event is, when and where, whom it benefits (if anybody) and how much it costs. And, of course, the name, phone number and e-mail address of somebody we can contact if we have questions, as well as ways for the public to contact the organizers.

You needn't use a particular format. But if you're looking for guidance, you can use the form here, or get one at www.projo.com/calendar/eventform.htm. (You can copy that form into an e-mail and pop it right back to us, too.)

Why do we need all the information in writing? Because taking it over the phone involves much more time, and the chance for error is huge. Better to have something in your hand that you can check over before you send it to us, and that we can check over after we've typed the information in.

How to submit photos

And then, of course, there are those pictures. Did I mention that we prefer color, if possible? LIVE in particular is hungry for photographs, and we'd welcome yours.

If you're sending physical photos, we prefer glossy prints or slides; photocopies and computer printouts on your printer's regular paper won't reproduce well.

If you're sending electronic images, either in e-mail form or on a CD, they MUST be jpegs, 300 dots per inch (dpi) and 6 or 7 inches in size. Smaller, lower-resolution pictures, though fine for uses such as Web sites, won't work well with our production process.

If someone in your theater group with a digital camera can photograph a dress rehearsal or performance of a current or upcoming production, go to projo.com/theater to see how to get the photo published on that Web page along with showtimes and contact info.

Don't send hyper-compressed formats such as zip or stuffit, though; the jpeg is as condensed as we like.

Send it along

Send all this material to the appropriate person at Features Department, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI, 02902. Or fax it to (401) 277-8175. Or e-mail to pjfeat@projo.com.

If you normally send your information to some other part of the paper -- one of our bureaus, say, or the City Desk -- please send it to us, too. That will avoid time lags in passing information along, as well as the possibility that it won't get to us at all.

(Please don't send event information directly to projo.com, though; we compile all of their listings. And although we sometimes run out of listings space in the newspaper, there's unlimited room in cyberspace, so even when we have to trim the printed version there's a full list there.

(But if you're a Rhode Islander with a Web log, do let Sheila Lennon know directly. She's projo.com's features and interactive producer, reachable at lennon@projo.com.)

We consider community events news, so these listings and photos are printed free of charge, though because of space constraints we can't ever promise publication. But if you let us know by our deadlines, we'll make every effort to let people know about your event.

And if you tell us about errors or changes, we can avoid the embarassment and disservice to readers of repeating the same mistakes over and over.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal's assistant features editor.

arosenberg@projo.com / (401) 277-7253