Newspapers do lots of things well. They inform, they expose, and they’re good for giving your windows a streak-free shine. But one thing they generally fail at is coming clean when they’ve made a mistake — and the Herald recently made one of the biggest imaginable.

Last Friday, the Herald ran a story (and I use that term intentionally) about Spencer’s Coffeehouse, which I own and operate. Herald photographer Chris Fryer had visited the day prior, and was professional, courteous and asked good questions. However, I never heard from a reporter.

The next day, my staff greeted me with jokes about our new employee, “Chelsea.” Quoted in the story, she supposedly worked for me for three years; it was news to me! And as I read the story closely, I knew that this was no “error,” but an absolute fabrication. Every quote in the story sounds like dialogue from a made-for-TV movie, and the names of the story’s supposed “regular customers” are foreign to me and my staff. How the story didn’t raise red flags among the Herald’s editors is beyond me.

“But,” you may ask, “why complain? It was a positive story!” It was, and I’m glad the Herald saw fit to do an article on our shop. But as a Herald alum and recovering professional journalist, I feel obliged to object. The reporter has been sacked, which is a start, but anyone reading the “From the Editor” apology in Tuesday’s Herald would be hard-pressed to say exactly what the reporter did wrong. “Created information” is the way the note put it; this is a bit like calling torture an “enhanced interrogation technique.” What she did was to write an absolute fiction, plain and simple.

Does “Bowling Green resident Chelsea Daly” even exist? If she’s really a 2007 graduate, she’d show up in alumni records; she doesn’t. What about “Leah Sommers,” who the Herald admits doesn’t work at the police department as the article says? I’ve got a free latte for anyone who can prove these people exist. And the article’s claim that I “couldn’t be reached for comment” is simply false.

It would’ve been easier for the reporter to stroll down the hill and talk to actual people. But almost as bad is that the Herald spent so much effort in crafting a long note about “factual errors,” when they could’ve written a three-sentence correction that read: “Spencer’s Coffeehouse, as referenced in our front-page story, does exist. The people in the story did not. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

But there is a bright side. For one, this could push the Herald’s student journalists to take the weight of their responsibility a little more seriously. And the reporter may now be able to admit her true calling, and switch departments to major in English with an emphasis in creative writing.

This commentary does not represent the views of the Herald or the university.