A resident and employee of the city of Jennings has called twice in recent weeks to object to the Post-Dispatch’s depiction of the town. She says many people in the region already have a negative image of Jennings, and she thinks the newspaper unfairly makes it worse.

An error in the Law & Order column Wednesday July 23 prompted her first call. An item said the victim of a fatal shooting near Tower Grove Park was a Jennings resident. The man lived on Maldon Lane, which is in Dellwood. The original misinformation came from St. Louis police , but our verification guidelines call for double-checking that info.

No doubt, we messed up. No excuses. We ran a correction.

But even if the victim of the killing had been a Jennings resident, does that reflect poorly on the town?

The reader’s second call stemmed from Sunday’s extensive report by Business reporter Tim Logan on the increasing number of foreclosures in the area. Graphics that accompanied the story dealt with foreclosures by ZIP code. A chart on Page One identified the 63136 ZIP code as the “Jennings, Dellwood area.” A chart inside identified the 63136 ZIP code as “Jennings.”

The caller noted that the 63136 ZIP code contains chunks of several towns. The ZIP code may be known as the Jennings Post Office, but it’s not just Jennings. And to call it Jennings makes it appear that people there are poor or incapable of keeping their homes, she said.

I asked Jean Buchanan, our projects editor who helped supervise the foreclosures series, if we the ZIP descriptions were too vague. Her reply: “We used the city that the U.S. Postal Service lists for each ZIP. That’s why our online map refers to them as “areas” and not cities.” (So did the graphic in Sunday’s paper.)