That sinking feeling of getting it wrong...

HOW do you deal with a 95-year-old reader you have inadvertently let down?

Let me explain. Regional journalists like to feel they're helping local people and, more often than not, they do.

Especially the old and vulnerable, and those with nowhere else to turn.

The evening paper especially, as well as its big breaking stories and regionwide campaigns, can also call for justice in a small way for minor matters that would never make the pages or airwaves of any other media.

And they provide a way for readers to reflect their angst, joys, sorrows or celebrations, either through small stories on inside news pages or through the letters pages.

The Birmingham Mail's letters page provides this latter window for more that 80 readers every week, and is part of the paper I care for as often as I can personally, because of its direct link with our audience.

Not much can or should go wrong here, surely? But it did for me and one of my 95-year-old readers the other week.

It started with a letter she had sent via copytakers by phone, so there was no shaky ink writing that sometimes gives ages away.

It was an angry letter, succinct and well-phrased, from an indignant lady who'd had a decorative item stolen from her garden.

She demanded, through our letters page, for it to be returned by whoever took it without delay. Her letter read quite forthright, determined and upstanding. She didn't appear very elderly, frail or vulnerable.

Items for the Birmingham Mail's letters pages are normally placed with full names but only a suburb instead of the full postal address.

On this occasion, for what I thought was practicality and the stated wishes of the correspondent, I included the full postal address.

That was what I thought she wanted and, I'd hoped in passing, the lady concerned might see her treasured garden ornament again. But I should have double-checked first, of course.

I realised my error when she phoned in near-tears. She had never written to a newspaper before, she explained, and had not dreamt that we would include her address.

Yes, she realised why we had used it, but that eventuality hadn't occurred to her and now she felt upset, embarrassed by what neighbours might think and frightened of the world at large knowing where she was in print.

And here she was, a 95-year-old for pity's sake, at her wits end of what this might mean for her, living alone.

Weak excuses aside, I'd personally let her down. I took her call into my office and spent a good 15-minutes trying to reassure her, and then more time listening to her life story of sadness.

First the treasured stolen item, which was her beloved late husband's, and through which she felt she was holding his hand when she touched it; she still deeply grieved his passing ten years before; her daughter had died at six from an illness; her son had died in recent years; and her grandson (I think her only grandchild) didn't visit often.

And now her local paper, (through which she wanted only wanted to vent her anger, really, albeit through a symbolic call for justice that she never intended to be fully detailed,) had shone a mini-light on her personal address.

However much I may have felt this was not the case, and that people would think well of her for publicly asking for her property back, her perception was that they would not. And perceptions, as we know, are important.

All I could do was listen, apologise, reassure, empathise and talk with her about a life I didn't know but could imagine was stressed with loneliness and concern.

After her call, I used her address one more time to order a bouquet of flowers which I hoped would cheer her up. And, according to her call later that day after receiving them, they had brightened her day, also giving her a good reason to call again and to once more share her ups and downs with me.

A even happier ending, of course, will be to learn that she has also had the treasured item returned to her garden, although to date this has not happened.

The moral of the story? Newspapers, of all organisations, must handle well-meaning readers' personal details with the utmost care, checking that they agree with how we plan to use them.