The Editor's Desk

Some readers received papers today that contained printing glitches. At my house, the obituary page was blank and pages in classified and sports were only partially printed. Other papers were delivered with text smeared and unreadable on some pages. Several readers called me this morning to complain about this. The problem was caused because someone in the pressroom used an ink filter that was not the correct size. The problem was identified during the press run, and thousands of papers were discarded, but unfortunately, some mistakenly got onto our trucks and were sent to some of our customers.
Apparently this problem affected papers delivered in northeast and west Wichita, and I also had a call from a woman in south Wichita who was understandably very upset because her obituary page was illegible, and her daughter’s obituary was listed today. We hand-delivered a stack of good papers to her, and we’ll be publishing her daughter’s obituary again tomorrow. We’re not sure how many papers were affected, though Bill Wagenbaur, our VP for operations, estimates it was not a widespread problem. We apologize for any inconvenience. While the newsroom doesn’t handle most obituaries that run in The Eagle, we certainly appreciate how important these are to our readers.