Last week was a rough one here at the Iowa State Daily.

We had trouble with our own mistakes and trouble with things that were out of our control. But that’s the way it goes a lot of times in the newspaper world.

Good things come in waves. Bad things come in tidal waves.

In the spirit of honesty and openness, let me explain the two biggest headaches of last week. My point is not to counsel myself and my staff through words, nor is it to add insult to injury.

But very few good things come out of silence, and since the Iowa State Daily is ultimately accountable to readers — to students — you have a right to know what goes on at your student newspaper, good or bad.

FOR STARTERS — The Government of the Student Body met Wednesday night, as it does every Wednesday night. Senators held a somewhat long and confusing meeting, but nothing the Daily wasn’t capable of reporting on accurately.

In the wake of this reported assault on a black student security officer on Oct. 18, everything’s been a little touchy around here.

Things were touchy at GSB. A bill came up to add $1,000 to the rapidly ballooning reward fund for arrests in the case.

Somewhere between debates, discussion, amendments, motions to table, regular votes and unanimous consent votes, senators approved the measure, as well they should have.

Here’s where we messed up. The Daily reporter at the meeting — in all fairness a nice guy who simply made a mistake — thought the allocation bill itself was tabled indefinitely.

It was an amendment that was tabled indefinitely, not the bill. In fact, the bill passed by unanimous consent.

If you picked up Thursday’s Daily, however, you would never have known we had gotten it 100 percent wrong.

After the paper had been put to bed and sent to our printing plant in Webster City, Daily News Editor Keesia Wirt had a passing conversation about how GSB had “failed to allocate” some reward money.

Several phone calls later, Keesia had the real story. She knew we had it wrong. She contacted me at home about 1:30 Thursday morning, normally way, way too late to change the paper.

My first thought was anger, then fear that my newspaper would erroneously deal a blow to campus race relations. But I was sure the paper had already started rolling off the presses, meaning there was little I could do. Our regular deadline is 11 p.m.

Keesia and I met in the office about 1:40 a.m., made a couple of calls and learned that the newspaper gods were shining on us in the dark of the night. The Daily was still a few minutes away from going to press. With an accurate story in hand, we flew — actually we drove really, really fast — to Webster City.

We got there in time. We got it fixed.

And I thought all was well. But you see, the Daily is disseminated in two ways: on newsprint and via the Internet. I forgot about that. We didn’t get the correct story on our homepage until late Thursday morning.

This was a problem.

FOR AN ENCORE — What we didn’t need Thursday was another debacle. What we got was another debacle.

The Daily held a mock election, jointly sponsored with GSB, on Wednesday. We were looking forward to learning about campus political tendencies. We thought we would know those tendencies when we counted the 440 ballots on Friday.

But about the only thing we learned from the mock election is that we all need a lesson in fairness.

You see, somebody stuffed our ballot box with votes for Republican candidates. You see, we erroneously allowed members of a campus political group to help count ballots. (That’s not to say these people did anything wrong, but the potential for impropriety was there.) You see, I learned Friday that throughout the course of the mock election, there were flagrant attempts to influence votes at the ballot box.

I was left with serious doubts about the validity of the mock election. None of these things should have happened, especially the gross misconduct at the ballot box.

So in a sense I had to throw out the results. I had to tell people that I couldn’t stand by the products of my own election. Some said that was too harsh. I disagree. I don’t think I had another choice.

This, too, was a problem.

But it’s a new week now. And the great thing about newspapers is that you get a clean slate everyday, a new chance to rock the world with your journalistic revelations, and yep, a new chance to make mistakes.

But this week will be a better week for the Iowa State Daily, at least of that I’m sure.

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Chris Miller is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown. He is editor in chief of the Daily.