Your primary is my Tuesday

Oh election night. That one night out of the year where all the news copy isn't in by 9 p.m. ...

 

Used to love watching how nervous everyone in news got because they had blank pages at 9 p.m.

And used to enjoy the pizza and the sandwiches as well. Unlike some papers, it was accepted that the sports staffers could eat as well, because they knew that we did what they were doing every night.

 

Once upon a time it was. In the days of 14-16 page weekday sections, no modules, up to 30 stories for the desk to copyedit and an understanding that there better be a reason "Story XYZ" didn't make the paper if the sports editor thinks it should have. It's just not the case or the culture anymore.

Today, my shifts laying out Metro section (one person doing 17 pages spanning two editions last Friday) are much more difficult than my sports shifts (two people doing 8-12 pages). In 24 years in this business, I've never had to do more than 42 columns of sports design in one shift . . . even in the salad days of 28-page Sunday sections. Did 52 columns last Friday in Metro.

 

Yeah, on our new consolidated desk, our design folks are laying out pages in up to three different papers a night. As for the newsies, um, more of them know how to handle a deadline than we give them credit for.

 

If the ME or management provides ANYTHING for free these days, take it.

We had a couple of boxes of pens from a local bank show up in the newsroom a few weeks ago. You would have thought the stampede was for homemade cookies!

 

This reminds me of our newsroom's new pizza policy, named after a fellow reporter.

He, I and two others had a meeting with the city ed. and ME about a series the paper wants to run. My colleague, call him Bob Smith, demanded to know where the pizza was for the meeting.

My ME actually seemed embarrassed he called a meeting WITHOUT pizza. So, he immediately instituted "the Smith Rule," which states any meeting between a manager and more than three employees requires pizza being provided at the cost of management.

 

priceless

 

Last election at my place ...

Editor to reporter: Where are you going?
Reporter: Getting food.
Editor: But results are starting to come in.
Reporter: And management quit providing food, so I'm going to eat. The results can wait.

Yep. Management cut food for the news side, so they took dinner breaks and the results fell behind, stories came in late. Missed deadline, too, so I'm curious to see what happens this year. I wonder if they understand that providing food was a means to keeping people in the office. You can't deny dinner breaks, and you can't force people to stay inside.

 

Wow. They say that Americans don't follow foreign news anymore but to have all these shops devoting so much resources to the British general election, it's... well... inspiring.

 

In most places here the British polls will be closed before 5 o'clock.