We made a big mistake in today's Star. One of our two comic pages was the Feb. 23 page instead of the March 23 page.

In the newspaper business you learn a few things very quickly. One is that there is no small mistake. And, two, that when you make a mistake, it lives for eternity. If I make a mistake in this blog, I can go back in a minute after it's posted online and correct it. If I make a mistake in the paper (say, maybe, printing the wrong comics page, for instance), it will be there. Forever.

So, how did today's mistake happen?

When the page got ready to be put on the press, we looked into our computer system for the comics page of the 23rd and pulled the page from last month instead of this month. There are all kinds of checks and balances we have built into our system. One of which is to check the comics themselves, which are individually dated in fine print. But obviously in the rush to produce yesterday's paper, we didn't fully check it out.

And part of the problem is our system. We have a new operating system for our newsroom. Normally, pages a month old are not accessible. But because we are having trouble with the archive portion of our new system, we are not purging old files out of the system until we know the archive is working. Those pages should be gone in two weeks into the archive. They weren't.

Our solution is to reprint that page in tomorrow's Star, along with tomorrow's comics. Of course you can't just add one page to a paper, so we had to add two pages to the Arts & Living section. And that costs us some money, in addition to the loss of goodwill by those of you out there who think were sloppy, or worse, in printing old comics and puzzles.