By Anne Harpham

Neil Abercrombie has been a member of Hawai'i's congressional delegation — in the House of Representatives — for more than a decade. Every member of our staff knows that, or should know it.

So there's no good explanation for a photo caption in the morning edition on Tuesday in which we "promoted" Abercrombie to the position of senator. How could you get it wrong, a number of readers wondered. It's a good question, because there is a process that is supposed to eliminate errors.

That process failed us for a second time last week with a caption on a picture from the May Day concert at the Waikiki Shell. We mixed up brothers Robert and Roland Cazimero, two well-known entertainers, in Thursday's morning edition on Page A4.

Nothing should get into the paper with just one pair of eyes looking at it. More than one editor is responsible for checking stories, photos, captions, headlines and graphics.

With the Abercrombie photo, the error started with the photographer who called Abercrombie senator in the caption information she submitted to her editor. That editor read right over the mistake and it was passed on to a copy editor who wrote the caption, repeating the mistake. Another copy editor read the caption and was supposed to check both it and the headline. And then a proofreader read the page.

Every one of those people had the responsibility to look for errors and each slipped.

In the Cazimero photo, the error likewise started with the photographer and it was repeated by the copy editor who wrote the caption that appeared in the paper.

We don't like to let those kinds of mistakes happen, obviously.

It's an iron rule in journalism that the one mistake you miss will be noticed while the hundreds you catch will never be mentioned.

That's because most of the time the system works the way it is supposed to. Headlines get rewritten by the news editor or copy desk chief for more clarity or to fix an error.

Captions get sent back to the writer for more or better information, names get corrected in stories and necessary information gets inserted.

The Abercrombie and Cazimero mistakes are important lessons to us. Names that are in the news a lot become routine and it is easy to make an assumption the title is right just because the person is so well known.

No one paid enough attention in either caption and that's a trap journalists have to be careful to avoid.

It's the same with telephone numbers. We can check them a hundred times for accuracy and forget to check just once — and that's the time the number will be wrong.

There was another caption that tripped us up last week.

Leah McCullough took part in the Baseball Dash competition in a break in the UH-Fresno State baseball game at Les Murakami Stadium last Sunday.

Leah won, but we gave that honor to another girl in the caption on Page B3 Monday.

In this case, we were given the wrong information by an official at the stadium.

That it wasn't our fault doesn't make it any less disappointing to Leah and her family. But it points to another problem that journalists face — we're moving fast and we have to rely on information given to us by official sources to be accurate.

On rare occasions it is not.

Senior editor Anne Harpham is the reader representative. Reach her at aharpham@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8033.