People who read local newspapers, which presumably includes you right now, may have noticed an extremely unfortunate gaffe made by The Daytona Beach News-Journal, our colleagues on the east side of Volusia, on Feb. 4. An article about the Deltona mayor was titled in print “DeLand mayor’s finances under scrutiny.”

Yikes.

This was a particularly egregious mistake, so much so that it prompted the City of DeLand to issue a formal statement chiding the paper like a disappointed parent.

This isn’t really a dig at them — we all make mistakes. But there is a reason this mistake happened, and there is a reason why it is extremely unlikely The Beacon will ever make this kind of error.

For some background — The News-Journal has been owned by investment groups ever since 2010, and in 2015, they were bought by New Media Investment Group, aka Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the world.

And like most once-independently owned newspapers, takeover by hedge funds and investment groups led to a gutting of the newsroom and outsourcing of important jobs. Like, say, page design. That explains how “DeLand mayor’s finances under scrutiny” appears as a headline in an article where the first sentence explicitly refers to the Deltona mayor.

I’m not going to spend too much time defending the hardworking local journalists who have nothing to do with this mistake since, you know, they’re kinda one of our competitors.

I am going to point out that The Beacon doesn’t outsource anything. We make the pages, edit the photos, answer the emails and at least four sets of eyes and hands are on every page, multiple times before we ever ship to the printer.

If you call the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., you won’t hear an automated menu, you will reach Coni, a lovely human person who makes a killer peach cobbler.

All of our employees work and live in Volusia — Pierson, Lake Helen, DeLand, Deltona, Orange City, Hontoon Island.

We’re independently owned with an actual office you can come by and visit in Downtown DeLand. In fact, we have an open house Feb. 26 where you can stop by and see the team individually label every single paper we send to subscribers, bundle them, and prepare to ship them to the post office down the street.

The paper literally has our fingerprints. The ink stains our hands and runs in our blood.

If I sound like I am proud, it’s because I am. It’s not like we don’t make minor mistakes. (In the last paper, for instance, there was a set of parentheses that did not close. Which drives me nuts!)

But because every part of our process is local, independent and informed by more than 100 years of newspaper history, our mistakes are our own — not the result of someone in another state laying out your local news.