NJGPA Practice Test 1

Correction — by Giulia Fairbanks

¹For the first three weeks of July, Farah Darwish had believed she was the most careful intern the Kettle Valley Herald had ever hired. Now it was 5:40 on a Thursday morning, and she was standing barefoot on her family's porch, pulling the paper out of its plastic sleeve with hands that would not hold still. She had been awake since three. She turned to page A4, and there it was, exactly where she had known it would be: her photograph of the Founders' Day pie contest, four columns wide. If no one else saw it, she told herself, it might almost not count.

²Beneath the photograph, in neat gray type, ran the caption she had written: Lorraine Albright of Cedar Hollow holds up her blue-ribbon peach pie Saturday at the Kettle Valley fairgrounds.

³The woman in the photograph was not Lorraine Albright. Farah had realized it at 2:50 a.m., lying in bed and replaying the afternoon the way she always did after an assignment. Lorraine Albright had worn a straw hat. The woman grinning over the pie in the picture, flour on her forearm and the ribbon pinned crookedly to her apron, wore no hat at all. She was, Farah was now almost certain, Lorraine's younger sister, who had entered a cherry pie, placed nowhere, and offered to hold the winner for the camera "because Lorrie can't stand having her picture taken."

⁴It was a small mistake. That was what she had been telling herself for two hours and forty minutes. It was a small paper in a small town, and the picture was of a pie. Most readers would glance at it on the way to the box scores. Possibly no one would notice. Possibly the sisters would find it funny.

⁵On her first day at the Herald, six weeks earlier, Mr. Ibsen, the editor, had walked her through the newsroom—four desks, a coffee maker, a police scanner muttering in the corner—and stopped at a bulletin board near the door. Pinned to it were dozens of yellowed clippings, each only a few lines long. "Our corrections," he had said. "Every one we've run since I started, twenty-two years ago." Farah had thought he was showing her a wall of shame. She had stood up a little straighter and promised herself that nothing of hers would ever hang there.

⁶Now she imagined walking into that newsroom with the paper under her arm. She had checked the proof of page A4 herself the night before—Mr. Ibsen had let her, as a kind of reward—and she had looked straight at the caption and seen exactly what she expected to see.

⁷Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Mr. Ibsen, who was always at his desk by six: Nice art on A4.

⁸Farah sat down on the porch step. Across the street, Mr. Gallagher was watering his tomatoes in his bathrobe. She typed Thank you and deleted it. She typed There's a problem with the caption and looked at it for a long time. Then she sent it before she could stop herself, and added: It's not Lorraine Albright. I think it's her sister. I should have asked her name twice.

⁹The reply took four minutes, which she spent with her forehead on her knees. Come in at 8. Bring the sister's name.

¹⁰At eight she walked into the newsroom with an index card that said Jolene Albright Fenn; she had gotten the name by calling the fairgrounds office the moment it opened. Mr. Ibsen did not look angry. He looked, if anything, mildly pleased, the way he looked when a story came in on time.

¹¹"Write the correction," he said. "Two sentences. Facts only. No apologies—the correction is the apology." He read it over her shoulder and changed one word. Then he stood, crossed to the bulletin board, and tapped the oldest clipping, so yellow it was nearly brown.

¹²"Mine," he said. "First week on the job. I spelled the mayor's name wrong. Twice, in the same article." He shrugged. "You know what this board is? It isn't the mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. It's every time somebody in this room told the truth when it would have been easier not to. That's why people believe the rest of the paper."

¹³The correction ran the next morning on page A2, two sentences long. Farah cut it out with her mother's sewing scissors, carried it to work, and pinned it to the board herself, near the bottom, beside a clipping about a misreported track score. It looked very small among all the others. She found that she was not ashamed of it at all.