By now, you may have read the reader comments attached to the Wednesday story about how a poor family from Augusta is struggling this winter to deal with high heating costs. Many of the reader posts on yesterday's article were critical of the family. Readers expressed little sympathy for this family's plight.

Today's follow-up article by reporter Gary Remal explored what readers wrote and had several advocates for people/families in need saying this is why it's risky going to the media with examples of people who are struggling. The subjects can be ridiculed. They can be hurt. And they're already going through a tough time.

Readers: In today's blog entry, I'm sharing the critique I wrote Monday and shared with our staff. Sometimes, readers ask us if anyone's editing the paper. Are we reviewing what we do -- before, during and after publication? The answer is yes, and I hope this critique points to that. I do these several times a week.

It's not the only critical tool we use: Our other editors give feedback to reporters, photographers and page designers all the time. And serious errors or patterns of performance can be dealt with in other ways. But these critiques are useful, though it can hurt when a staffer is the (unnamed) subject of the editor's criticism.

Don't get me wrong, we still make mistakes -- in punctuation, grammar, statistics and even facts on occasion. But I wanted readers to know that we take our performance very seriously.

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Folks: It's been a while since I've written a critique, daily or otherwise, although we have been communicating in person and via e-mail with regard to deadlines, earlier delivery, the Web sites, and more. We have a lot of balls in the air but we are making nice progress on most fronts.

Recent highlights:
Last Sunday's story by AJ Higgins on Jean-Paul Poulain was a good example of following breaking news with good, explanatory and even semi-investigative reporting and writing. We already knew that Poulain was dead and who allegedly killed him. But we didn't know why the once-renowned singer got to this point in his life, and how he crossed paths with two young men on the night of his death. AJ explained all of that, and it was a pretty dark -- but very readable -- tale.

We are using some of our best visual talent -- including Sharon Wood and Ben Sturtevant -- on A1 more than we have in the past. Both played roles in the KJ's Poulain centerpiece, and Sharon also helped design the KJ Sunday front page yesterday with graduation art. However, good visual planning requires knowing early on what stories are coming, filing them earlier, etc. I also want to make sure the Morning Sentinel uses Sharon and Ben more, and Stacy Blanchet as her time permits.

The A1 "mixes" in both papers Sunday and Monday (most recent weekend) was very good. Kudos to Travis L. for his surprising enterprise story on OTBs, timed for the final weekend of the Triple Crown. Craig Crosby broke a nice story about two men planning a winery, and explained how they came together. Gary Remal's A1 story on the flatiron building was a thorough, central-city enterprise piece, perfect to lead the Monday paper.

We're doing this kind of enterprise when we also are scrambling to cover local graduations, and prepare for an election tonight. This election's not huge, but they're all important, and we do need to preview each community's vote and report the results (remember, deadlines have changed for tomorrow). Thanks to both News staffs on all of this. Having Sports pitch in an A1 enterprise story also helped a lot.

I want to commend photog Andy Molloy on his graduation "coverage" in Monday's KJ. Andy was at no fewer than 4 graduations yesterday, and it's obvious from the way he shot them -- and how the desk (Stephanie Law, perhaps?) played them -- that we took great care to take unique photos town-by-town, images with different perspectives. Yet, they worked to complement one another in a visual package. Very well shot, chosen and displayed.

Coulda been betters:
An Outdoors page piece a week or so back had a local police officer holding a giant "turtle," which we identified -- and he identified -- as a snapping turtle. It wasn't. It was an exotic species of tortoise, and many naturalists in the area quickly realized this. There's a lesson in this for all of us: When in doubt, check these things. This is no slam to our newspapers; when I was in Portland "we" ran a non-milking cow photo with a story on milk prices; we ran a photo of an inedible fiddlehead species with a recipe story on cooking fiddleheads. These are easy mistakes to make but they are profound too. If we have an animal, plant, bird, fish and we're not sure ourselves what it is, take the time to ask an expert.

Our on-deadline story Saturday about the New Portland homicide was confusing. There were multiple time references, yet most did not include a.m. or p.m. after the times, so readers really couldn't understand the time sequence of what happened. The first two sentences were redundant and even used many of the same words. The Sun-Journal story didn't have any more facts, really, but was clearer. They followed for Sunday; we followed for Monday. This is a major crime story and the killer is still at large. It's the best story going at either paper right now.

Readers notice
A reader wrote to me over the weekend expressing dismay that a high school sports story included a fair amount of medical detail that one top performer was back after suffering an injury several weeks ago. This was one sentence in the body of a story or roundup. The reader thought that was too detailed, and I would agree. I might not agree if it was Tom Brady, or a top pro athlete, but we can be a little more sensitive and careful in writing about high school students.