COVERING Election Day

Your resignation letter should already be on the boss's desk.

 

Waaaaaah!

 

Get the sports crew and go over and eat it anyways. What are they going to do, fire the whole sports staff?

 

At my last newspaper stop we never got jealous of the election night pizza because management sprung for pizza for the sports desk every Friday night during HS football season.

Suck on that, news side!

 

:

 

Nine local stories written by three staffers. Two people editing copy, posting to the web, posting to Facebook and sending out email blasts. Three AP stories on statewide stuff. We'll have a 1A rail with results. Our deadline got pushed back an hour, so we print at 1:30 a.m.

But I've already done the most important thing an editor can do on Election Day: ordered pizza.

 

Spent the past few years working in the nation's capital and a state capital. Political reporters produce more deadline copy under difficult circumstances than most sports writers could possibly imagine. Or handle.

 

That is called smart management.

 

Or pool money and order out for something that makes pizza look like, well, pizza. Something that smells goooood.

 

We're getting Lenny's sandwiches, not pizza. That's a win in my book.

 

...Or get a tailgate grill going in the parking lot.

 

Someone should do a management case study of the sports-news divide, specifically on the issue of Election Night pizza. It's so weird, it's like Charles Foster Kane drew it up to create an us-vs.-them mentality within the newsroom and prompt everyone to forget that while they're fighting over this free meal with a value of about three dollars, they all give the company thousands of dollars in free work every year. It's the business world's version of the guy who gets six friends to help him move and springs for dinner and beers instead of paying actual movers.

In my experience the pizza serves as a cause of actual dislike between sports and news people too. I admit I got suckered into that mentality early in my career; thankfully I had later jobs that allowed me to interact more with folks from the news side, and I made a lot of new friends.

The idea that news-siders are lazy and/or can't handle pressure is garbage. They handle it fine. That's why sports is able to have later deadlines, because the news side got its work done a couple hours earlier.