I'll never forget the first time I felt completely embarrassed by an error. As a young copy editor on the sports desk of the Laramie Boomerang, I wrote a headline about Daryl Strawberry's latest -- may have even been his last -- suspension from Major League Baseball. In the headline, I misspelled the word "indefinitely."

What made this error particularly bad over others I've made is that my own mother made fun of it. She didn't realize as she was saying it that it was my headline (headline writers don't get bylines, after all), but she still had every right to ask why such a gross mistake had made its way into her newspaper.

My accuracy has improved over the years, so much so that I'm even trusted to teach editing for the world's top Journalism School. But recently, I've learned a whole new lesson on accuracy: When you screw up on the Web, it will haunt you -- forever.

I was reminded of this while reading the Columbia Heart Beat today. Mike Martin's feature about Tom Dresner, the former interim chief and current No. 2 at the Columbia Police Department, mentioned an embarrassing error that Dresner called me out on a few weeks back.

Newly-appointed deputy Columbia police chief Tom Dresner was interim chief when he took to blogging on the Missourian's website back in mid-March, to set the record straight in a story about Tasers with Missourian opinion page editor Jake Sherlock.

"Jake, you didn't read my Thursday press release very closely," Dresner blogged, and to good effect. Calling the report "erroneous and "below Missourian standards," Sherlock apologized and made a correction. "Wow, Jake, very nice apology. I appreciate that very much," Dresner blogged in response.

Every word of it is true. I blew it big time that day, and Dresner was absolutely right to call me out on it. I also really appreciate how understanding he was about the whole thing.
At the time, I was very relieved that I was able to message the copy desk with a rewrite of that particular piece. And while I'm still glad I was able to quickly correct things and make amends, the fact that I made the errors I did still makes me mad at myself. 

Just like how we coach students to be careful with their online profiles, this is one error that is going to haunt me via Google for a long time. This isn't the first time that story and my exchange with Dresner has been linked; my boss wrote a similar column to Martin's about a month ago, and my pal Rob also references it in a blog post.

My only intention that day was to spark some conversation about Taser policies for the Columbia Police Department. Little did I know so many lessons would come out of it. They are, in now particular order:

• As if there aren't enough reasons to hate inaccuracies, we have one more -- the fact that it will live in infamy on the Web. 
  
• The Web gives everyone the ability to be part of the "Fifth Estate" -- a watchdog for the watchdogs. 
• As Clyde Bentley, an MU journalism professor, has told me several times, the beauty of the Web is that it is correctable. The article is now factually accurate, and the process of how it went from inaccurate to accurate is also very transparent on the page.
  

So, does this hurt my career? Will it make it harder for me to get a job outside the J School? Will it hurt my chances for promotion at the J School? Does it make me less credible as a journalist?

Well, it certainly doesn't help things. I fully expect for it to be brought up in my annual review, and I plan to bring it up in my self-assessment. Short-term, I wouldn't be surprised if it stayed alive in the memories of some of our more dedicated readers.

Long-term, I look at it like a motorist living in a state with a point system. If I keep getting into accidents and posting speeding tickets, I'll lose my license. If I keep making bonehead errors like these, I'll lose the trust of the public.

In the long haul, that type of scorecard system will go a long way in improving accuracy and exposing ethical breaches.

Well, I just got done creating the new Twitter account CoMissourianNow. This will be our new feed for tweeting live events, speeches, conferences, etc. etc. We won't make the mistake of tweeting any funerals.

One problem I ran into was the length of the name I could create for the Twitter account. I wanted the name to be CoMissourianEvents, but that was too long by about three characters. If I'm going to keep us branded as CoMissourian, I'll only have three characters to play with to create any new feeds. Thus, no CoMissourianSports, CoMissourianHeadlines or CoMissourianPolitical.

Instead, maybe I'll try: CoMissourianSP, CoMissourianHL and CoMissourianCrooks. Just kidding on that last one. Maybe CoMissourianPol?

While I'm not a big fan of the abbreviations, I'm telling myself it will be OK for two reasons: 1) A specially designed logo for each feed, like this one I created for CoMissourianNow (if Twitter will ever let me upload it).

Here it is:



2) It's Twitter. It's all about abbreviations. There's only 140 characters, for goodness sake.

So there we go. Any feedback much appreciated. Leave a comment or hit me up via e-mail. I plan to roll out new feeds as we need them.

This was in my inbox this evening:

If you see her, please call the number listed.

I'm just using the ol' blog as an idea file for the development of a little project I call The Twitter Manifesto. It's designed to be a strategic plan for using Twitter to:

• Publish news
• Connect with readers: Tips, criticism, coverage requests, opinions, insider info, etc. etc.
  
• Promote content at the Mothership, ColumbiaMissourian.com. 

To that end, I plan to propose we create and begin using the following Twitter feeds:

CoMissourian: This is the mother feed, the one that tweets a little of everything from the feeds below, plus more. Back to that at the end.

CoMissourianHeadlines: For readers who prefer headlines by Twitter instead of RSS. Rob has suggested we may be able to automatically update this feed whenever we publish a story, which would be super cool.

CoMissourianSports: Used much like the sports ticker seen on ESPN, a collection of scores and vital stats. We could be tweeting anything and everything we would normally see on a traditional agate page, just not as in-depth. This would be a good skill for reporters covering games, especially because they could tweet by text message. The support staff back at the ranch could handle the major sports (Blues, Cards, Rams, Chiefs, etc. etc.). This would especially be a good way for Ron to bring his mad agate skills to Web 2.0. We could also use it to retweet community scores from softball leagues, soccer, Little League, etc. etc., so it's important to follow lots of people (i.e. mine the hell out of www.localtweeps.com for our area codes)

CoMissourianPolitical: A Twitter feed from our Jefferson City/MDN bureau. News as it happens from the Senate and the House.

CoMissourianEvents: Used to Twitter feed events that we cover live -- kind of like what we tried to do with David Sedaris, but more with memorable quotes than crowd reaction. This would also be a good place to tweet calendar events.

That's a lot of growth for one little newsroom that is still taking baby steps with its Twitter. But we'll get there.

Oh ya, back to what we'll do with the mother feed:

• Breaking news
• Solicit opinions/conversations on the news -- make it important to people!
  
• Promo other feeds on slow news days, but only sporadically.
  
• Promo only the best of the best from the Web site. Too much promo becomes spam.
  
• Publish replies in the Voices column in the print Missourian

Lastly, a few do's and don'ts with the Twitter feeds:

• DO: Build a landing page for it at ColumbiaMissourian.com
  
• DO: Use lots of hashtags. Users will find us this way. Popular ones are #como, #mizzou, #MO
• DON'T: Be a promotion whore. Again, too many tweets = spam
• DO: Respond to reader replies. Be professional and polite. Use direct messaging to swap phone numbers or e-mail addresses if you need more than 140 characters to reply. 
  
• DO: Retweet breaking news if you KNOW it's credible and trust the source. I can't stress that enough. It's our credibility on the line here -- no retweets about something made up. 
• DON'T: Be a jerk to other tweeters
• DON'T: Tweet for the sake of tweeting. If you're covering an event and can't think of anything good to tweet, don't do it. Think about what information you wish you had on your phone if you were at the event or wishing you were at the event.
  

That's a good amount for one night. Now it's late, and I'm beat. More later.