Check The Dates; How An Old Great Falls Article Is New Again

This is the time of the year where you'll see the announcers post their top stories of the past year. Nostalgia is always great. I, too, will be posting a similar article in the near future.

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First, I wanted to talk about an article that happened to pop up in December 2023, that I had written in December 2022.

The Businesses That Will Be Closed In Great Falls By December 31, 202 2

I will be the first to admit that the article had 2 mistakes in it. I had incorrectly stated that Anderson Pharmacy and The Windgate Hotel were closed. (In reality, Anderson Pharmacy just moved out of Snyder Drug, and the Windgate Hotel was sold and reopened.) The minute we found out, I ran a retraction article on the websites, all 8 of them, and the article was corrected.

Anderson Pharmacy and The Windgate Hotel Are Open

The original article did pretty well for me in 2022, and I thought it was the end of it.

Fast Forward To December 2023

We have trackers for our articles to see if they're being read, and how much they're being read.

All of a sudden, the business closure article was resurging. "What?", I thought? "That's WAY outdated news." So I did some research. Turns out, someone was still upset about the mistake I made in the article and they posted the article on Facebook. Ok. I'm not going to try to validate or invalidate anyone's feelings.

I do want to point out I did a retraction as soon as I found out the information was incorrect AND we took the wrong information out of the article and the gallery that accompanied it.

Things I Took Away From This

1. ALWAYS check the dates on anything you read on the internet. A lot of times things will show up again that are way out of date. The best way to combat that is by checking the date to see how timely the information is.

2. I realize that person is upset. That's awful, especially a full year later. However, in trying to point out the injustice of it all or whatever the reasoning behind it was, that person got me WAY closer to the goals that I have to hit in the company.

3. Have you ever noticed when an "injustice" is jumped on, they never ever post the retraction, correction or whatever the person did to fix it? By doing that, you could have saved yourself a full year of anger. A FULL YEAR OF BEING ANGRY, for a mistake that was corrected as soon as it was pointed out.

Here are the businesses that actually did close in Great Falls by 12/31/22 ⬇⬇⬇⬇