The good news: I’m taking a week or so off because … well, because it’s the Christmas season and I’m the laziest hardworking man in the blogosphere. (Or the hardest-working lazy man. I’m never sure which it is.)

There is no bad news.

Enjoy the holidays and I hope that your blessings are many, as are mine. If you’ve got four minutes to kill and a taste for fractured carols, watch this. Otherwise, see you next week.

The New York Post is justly famous for its headlines, and this one may be among its best. If you’re like me, you’ll have a moment of disbelief until it clicks, and you understand the wordplay. But for that nanosecond of time, you’ll have a classic WTF reaction.

If you’re in the mood for both good deeds and vocabulary tests, visit this site. For every word you get correct, 20 grains of rice is donated to the United Nations’ World Food Programme. (I’m not being pretentiously BBC-ish, by the way. That’s how the organization’s web site spells it.) Be forewarned, however: An hour can go by before you realize it.

Everyone’s got an opinion on what newspapers are doing wrong these days, but this piece from The Atlantic magazine is particularly interesting. The author asserts that newspapers have lost their way because they continue to believe that important is the same thing as interesting. To test his theory, he compared a week’s worth of the front pages of three big American daily papers – which is to say, he determined what editors had decided was important – and compared that against  the stories on the papers’ web sites that had been most frequently emailed by readers, which is to say the stories they’d found most interesting and wanted to share. Those two lists rarely matched up. Curiously, the stories on the “interesting” list weren’t of the Britney-Paris-Lindsay variety, so maybe we’re not as celebrity-obsessed as you might think. The author’s advice to editors? “Stop being important and start being interesting.”

If you checked in here yesterday, the time you did so determined which version of that day’s column you saw. If you read before 8:30 a.m. or so, you got the first, profoundly flawed version. If you read after that time, you got the “never mind ” version.

The problem was that the event upon which the column was based didn’t happen — something I learned at 8:23 a.m.

I won’t belabor the details. If you go to the bottom of this page and click on “previous entries,” it’s all explained there. I’ll say only that I relied on a News & Observer article for my facts, and those facts were … well, largely non-factual. It was a screw-up that embarrassed both the paper and the reporter who inadvertently caused it after being given bad information. I suffered no trauma, just a momentary flash of annoyance when I had to set my coffee aside and immediately go back into my web site to fix things there. In short, I’m not a victim.

If anything, this event prompted me to acknowledge the near-absolute dependency I have on the work of mainstream journalists (and more specifically, the work of N&O reporters, many of whom I know from my 14 years at the paper). By and large, I trust their reporting. They provide the baseline of information that I and most other digital current-events cowboys use as starting points for discussion, analysis, tweaking, ranting or whatever happens to be the order of the day. It would be dishonest and reprehensible for me to be snide about such a mistake. God knows I made enough of them during three decades in the business. (Besides, I know the reporter at fault to be a fellow of singular competence and ability, as well as the possessor of an agile mind. On top of all that, he’s a helluva Joycean scholar.)

But please understand that what appears above is not a wholesale endorsement of the journalism industry. In fact, there is much wrong with the media these days, most of which can be traced back to the industry’s upper managers, who are separate from the worker bees I praise above. The newspaper business is profoundly troubled, not only financially but also in terms of the public’s confidence in its mission and integrity. When that happens, you have to look at the leadership. After all, when the ship hits an iceberg, it’s not the fault of the guys shoveling coal in the boiler room.

I am frequently (and gleefully) disdainful of the people in charge of newspapers, who set the policies and direct the coverage. But at the same time, I’m respectful of the breadth and accuracy I usually find in most everyday news reports. That doesn’t feel like a contradictory pairing of reactions. It’s a simple acknowledgment of an essential truth: Most newspapers are better than the people who run them. Just because the captain is an idiot doesn’t mean the boilers don’t work.

Sure, a mistake in my local newspaper caused me some temporary heartburn, but I shrugged it off. I’ve benefitted from other people’s reporting too many times to now complain about an isolated lapse.