I jumped on the kick-newspapers-while-they-are-down bandwagon the other day with a rather flippant criticism on Facebook that went a bit haywire and wrongly hurt some feelings.

In hindsight, I understand why I felt compelled to highlight for my Facebook friends a typo in the San Francisco Chronicle, but I don’t feel good about it.

For one, I didn’t really check my facts before posting my little blurb, so my main point turned out to be largely wrong. Second, newspapers throughout the country are facing budget cuts, layoffs and unprecedented and undeserved disrespect, even contempt, from politicians and the public. They don’t need petty criticism from their former colleagues.

The drama started when my wife pointed out a passage in a story about how California counties have seen fewer solar energy installations this year.

“Many other counties, like Ventura and Organ, have also seen drops close to 80%,” the story declared.

There is, of course, no county known as Organ in California. I decided to point out the error because I had recently learned that some Chronicle copy desk functions had been moved by the paper’s Hearst Corporation overlords to the Houston Chronicle — in Texas, of all places. The news bothered me, mainly because the cost-cutting move seemed unnecessarily miserly and because, frankly, this San Francisco journalist had always considered the Houston Chronicle an inferior paper.

I wrote: “The following graf from a story about solar energy today is an example of why it’s a bad idea to have copy editors in Houston handling copy for the San Francisco Chronicle…”

The Organ reference generated much hilarity on Facebook. There were jokes about Organ transplants, liver donations, the “heartless and splenetic” residents and whether Organ is vital or if it could be surgically removed. Someone, amid the laughing emojis, made a crack about the size of the Organ, prompting me to chime in with my own little witticism.

“Organ County,” I wrote, “is known for its exclusive nightclubs, but they are all ‘members only,’ said Dixie Normous, the president of the Organ County board of supervisors.”

That’s about when Michael Gray, the director of features and daily enterprise at the Chronicle, stepped in.

“For the record,” he wrote in the comments, “such mistakes, when they are made, are still made right here in S.F. We still have a copy desk here. What’s moved to Houston is print design and production.”

Oh.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the writer meant to type “Orange.” Sure, the copy desk missed it, at least until I pointed it out, but those things happen. My point was that the Houston Chronicle should not be anywhere near San Francisco content. Still, getting all the facts right was something I prided myself on during my 30 year career as a journalist at the Chronicle and, even if it was only a Facebook post, I had missed a nuance.

Gray’s comment elicited more ribbing, snide remarks and some less-than-polite exchanges, including suggestions that he might work on being a little less thin skinned. I nevertheless felt a tinge of regret. My intent was not to denigrate a profession that I respect and dedicated a career doing, so I reached out.

I know Gray as an experienced editor and a good guy. He is passionate about journalism and had recently taken it upon himself to defend the Chronicle on social media against what he perceived as unfair criticism. He had just finished fending off public attacks from Chronicle alumni for failing to get the death of Willie Mays into print the next morning — the news happened after the print deadline but was splayed all over the online edition — when he wrote to me.

“What we do is never perfect, and it never has been, no matter what the memories of many alumni suggest,” Gray replied on Facebook messenger. “What irks me is the kind of knee-jerk, uninformed or simply snide remarks I so often see in social media threads that generate only heat and no light.”

The rampant criticism of newspapers is particularly frustrating for mainstream print journalists — who operate under long-held standards of objectivity — because we scribblers also often take heat for the partisan opinions, bias, rumor-mongering and sensationalism that television and online news outlets are infamous for. It didn’t help when presidential candidate Donald Trump called the press “the enemy of the people.”

The pandemic made an already bad financial situation even worse. Newspapers across the country, including the Chronicle, have been forced to layoff or buy out employees, shrink their coverage and hire less experienced workers who don’t cost as much as the veterans.

Journalists like me long for the days when newspaper reporters roamed far and wide and were mostly held in high esteem. I recall a certain brashness, a swashbuckling kind of charm, among my colleagues. It was a swagger that, in the words of Politico’s Jack Shafer, “was once journalism’s calling card.” So it’s not unreasonable for those of us who remember the good old days to complain about the way things have changed, but I do feel a responsibility to be fair.

“I am not suggesting that my paper or any publication is above criticism,” Gray said. “Dialogue is healthy, and we should be held to account just like the institutions we cover. I just think the conversation should be grounded in reality, not wishful thinking for something that no longer exists.”

As fun as it was to lampoon the fictional Organ County, my post was, ultimately, a nitpick to which Gray had a right to take offense.

The beleaguered Fourth Estate, to be fair, is still hanging on, fighting the good fight against troubling odds and an active national campaign to discredit both journalists and the outlets for which they work. Maybe those of us who still see the value of speaking truth to power would be better served closing ranks and defending what’s left of a still proud profession, flaws and all.