Let's start this month by looking at a small story with a big problem (some details have been changed to protect the guilty):

Headline: Women dies in early morning shooting

Wherever County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the shooting of a woman early Sunday. She was shot in the upper body at 1234 Rounder Drive, sheriff’s officials said. She was with four other women involved in an attempted robbery, the officials said.

Anyone with information can call Crime Stoppers at 765-4321.

The headline says the woman died, but nothing in the story says she did. In fact, she lived, prompting a later correction. (There's also the ambiguity of whether she was part of the robbery or somehow just "with" the other women.)

I call these “missing in plain sight” cases. There's just enough information to make you think it's all there, but a vital piece is missing. In this case, "shooting" sounds vaguely complete, but of course a person shot can be dead or injured.

Readers needed the woman's condition, and to get that the reporter probably needed her name, too. So one query from an editor could have produced two solid pieces of information and prevented that very wrong headline.

And if the information isn't available, say so. If it's likely to be an obvious question for readers, you won't hurt your credibility by saying you at least tried.

There was a time when such things seemed relatively rare – I could go weeks between adding to my collection. Now, my file seems to be regularly getting new entries.

– There was the recent full-color, spread in a newspaper's local lifestyle magazine touting how a county tennis center would be the center of a major national tournament. But if the readers wanted to go, they might have had to turn to Google – nowhere in the story did it say where that tennis center was.

– One story was full of details about a bank robbery, down to the street and block – except it left readers to guess the name of the bank.

– Another reported how a car had run off a local interstate highway interchange and hit a tree, killing the driver. But what interchange, exactly?

In each case, it seemed on the surface there was enough information, but when you dug deeper, there was a hole.

In the case of the tennis center story, it's a dangerous hole, too. Start sending your readers to something like Google to get the necessary information and they might just find they can get what they need without you.

It's not enough to have just the who, what, when, where, why and how; you have to make sure you have enough of each. But doing so is tough work and requires discipline and the time to enforce it.

You may have seen those brain-teasing examples where parts of words are left out or the letters scrambled, but we can still read and understand the text as long as the first and last letters are there. The brain is powerful in its ability to fill in the blanks, to press forward. It is born of the need to make quick, often life-preserving decisions with incomplete information, but it is a trait that does not always serve us well when writing or editing.

So while I'd like to think my file is swelling for a reason other than decimated, harried copy desks (and newsrooms overall), I fear that's why it is.

Aside from accuracy and credibility, there's another reason to pay attention. You might actually find a better story.

My friend Benjy Hamm, editorial director of Landmark Community Newspapers, uses for instruction a Florida newspaper article about how funding cuts were endangering summer classes at that state's colleges and universities. It meanders for about 20 inches through the budget woes and possibility of class cuts. But a few paragraphs from the end pops out a sentence that Florida makes students take nine summer credits.

A state that requires students to take summer courses to graduate is thinking of doing away with many of those courses? Isn't that something readers would be talking about tomorrow? If true – and with more information about that – you have a heck of a story.

And if it isn't true, questioning it could save an embarrassing gaffe.

Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at fisherdj@mailbox.sc.edu or 803-777-3315.