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Your longest work "shift" awake?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Matt Stephens, Feb 3, 2011.

  1. mustangj17

    mustangj17 Active Member

    That's crazy man. I don't know how you would do it. That's dedication.
     
  2. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    Recall being interim ME at a paper that was pm Mon-Fri and am Saturday, so basically for two months of Fridays, I'd go in around 7:30 a.m. and leave around midnight. Hell, walking two blocks down to a fast food joint was a luxury.

    Had one stint at another stop when our news editor was on vacation the week the home-and-garden show preview tab needed to be laid out, so went in around 9, did home and garden until 5, took a break, then worked on the front until 10 or so. Mostly mindless pagination of what events were scheduled when, but the paper was a sponsor, so it became one of the publisher's pet projects ... . Only thing I remember is bumping up the text a point to fill the sucker without canned copy. Felt damn good when I got to the last page and it worked!
     
  3. JPsT

    JPsT Member

    He said he works at a Rivals site. I'm guessing nearly everyone there would say NSD is their biggest day.
     
  4. Walter Burns

    Walter Burns Member

    I set the office endurance record with 34 straight hours to finish up a fall sports special section. I watched the dayside leave, the nightside come in, the nightside leave and the dayside come back in.
    "Didn't you wear that shirt yesterday," one of them said to me.
    "I haven't gone to bed yet," I said. "For me, it's still yesterday."
     
  5. bigbadeagle

    bigbadeagle Member

    Once did 40 hours straight trying to get our first magazine edition out. Can't understand for the life of me why newspapers want to get into the magazine world ... except to chase a few more shrinking ad dollar resources.
    Had one long week when we went from doing two preseason football tabs to four (publisher waited to pull that one off until I was on board, figuring if anybody could do it, I could. Yeah, thanks.)
    Another long week doing an 80-page broadsheet section on a welcome home for the troops after OIF 1. Luckily I had sketched out most of what I wanted to accomplish six months before the boss came to me with wanting to do one, figuring that was coming.
     
  6. BrianGriffin

    BrianGriffin Active Member

    I thought I had it rough with 8:45 a.m.-2 a.m.ish shift I did yesterday. Full disclosure: Not all of that was company time. Did a little stringing job at a basketball game last night. The hardest part was conducting a four-and-half-hour live chat for NSD. We had about 4,000 readers and tons of questions. No time to take a breathe during that.
     
  7. holy bull

    holy bull Active Member

    Came in early afternoon thinking I was going to get a head start on a special section for which I did all the writing and paginating and some graphic work. Walked in to find that it was suddenly due the next day, not in two days. 24+ hours later, went home smelly and crashed despite the fact that it was a gorgeous summer afternoon.
     
  8. e_bowker

    e_bowker Member

    Thanksgiving Day 1998. Left around 2 p.m. and drove 3 1/2 hours from Vicksburg to Oxford to cover the Ole Miss-Mississippi State football game that night. Game finishes up, I write my story and go to send ... and our POS laptop, which was always a crapshoot on whether it would actually send a story, decides to get cranky. Won't send for anything, and since we're a PM paper no one was in the office at midnight to take dictation or figure out what's wrong with the computer.
    So, after about 30 minutes of cussing and frustration, and the SIDs looking at their watches with one hand over the lightswitch, I decide to head home. Drive 4 1/2 hours back to the office (it was raining by then and my tires were bad, so I couldn't go more than about 55 mph) and get there around 5 a.m. I fire up the laptop, retype my 25-inch game story on the office computer and finish up as my editor is coming in to put out the paper at about 6:30.
    Total elapsed time: about 16 hours.
    Total "that sucks, but way to get the job done" compliments from the editor: Zero.
     
  9. jlee

    jlee Well-Known Member

    I worked about 54 of 60 hours while covering a sled dog race once, doing radio call-ins and three stories a day. The other six hours I spent either in a plane or chatting with an unlikely candidate to be my future girlfriend.
     
  10. Matt Stephens

    Matt Stephens Well-Known Member

    That definitely beats my two-hour chat with only 250 readers.
    Oh, and, good morning.
     
  11. Brian

    Brian Well-Known Member

    Twenty-one straight hours is the longest I've gone. Football tab.
     
  12. flexmaster33

    flexmaster33 Well-Known Member

    Had a 20-hour day a couple years ago...when our other reporter (small staff) left for another job about a week prior to our big fall championship weekend...ended up hitting 5 or 6 events in that one day from state cross country in the morning to a volleyball match in the afternoon, another volleyball on the trip home, and a soccer doubleheader later that night. Took off at 6 a.m. and returned home at 2 or 3 a.m. the next morning.

    I admit I kind of did that one to myself...looking back I would have sacrificed a few events from the schedule rather than sacrificing my sanity :)
     
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