I began my journalism career as a reporter for the United Press International wire service, where one of the more memorable mantras was: Get it FIRST, but get it RIGHT!

Not “almost right.” Not “sort of right.” Not “good enough.” RIGHT!

A noble goal, better achieved some days than others by us “Unipressers,” who are pretty great people, but also fallible humans.

Each day, back then, all UPI bureaus would “log” the daily -paper, thumbing through it to see whose version their editors used of any story: us, the enemy “Rox” (AP) or a mix of the two.

And we’d send the list to NX (the New York City bureau), which would compile “the log.” The goal, as always, was to “win the play” by writing in ways that lived up to that mantra in catchy, inviting and unique ways.

My start with UPI’s Portland bureau in the mid-’70s coincided with the shift to computers, the old green-screen text without a spell-check.

This all came to mind when, for the second time in a week or so, a very well known business book author and writer had a small typo, coincidentally in the sub-headline of their latest posts.

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