Editor's blog John Temple is the editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News. You can e-mail him at editor@rockymountainnews.com. He also writes a weekly Saturday column.

Here's the editor's note that appeared on page 2A of the Rocky today regarding our edition with the erroneous headline reporting that 12 miners had been found alive.

Headline: "How one News edition printed with an erroneous headline."

Some of you on the Front Range may have received a front page yesterday with the incorrect headline, “They’re alive!”
The headline accurately reflected an Associated Press story about the West Virginia coal mine disaster quoting the governor as saying of the trapped miners, “They told us they have 12 alive.” He was wrong. And so were we.
At about 1 a.m., as soon as we learned that in fact the 12 were dead, we stopped the presses, destroyed any papers still in the printing plant with the inaccurate headline, and redid our coverage. We were able to deliver the correct headline and story to about 75 percent of our readers on the Front Range.
Publishing a story that’s wrong, and especially a banner headline that’s wrong, is a nightmare of newspaper editors. I don’t see how we could have avoided it in this case. Papers across the country did the same. Why? Because it’s well nigh impossible not to report what a governor says on the record about a matter of intense public interest.
I apologize to those of you who received the jarring front page yesterday morning. You can be assured that we do our best to get stories right.
I wrote more about this issue on my blog at RockyMountainNews.com. Of course, you can also share your comments there, too.

This note was accompanied with pictures of all three front pages.

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