COVERING Election Day

Been doing it over a decade at several stops. Care to enlighten me?

 

A fire or murder, I can see and understand. Election, not so much. Like a football game, you know there's a contest. You just don't know who will win (for the most part) and what the final score is.

 

The real feud should be labor vs. management.

 

In the smallest area I ever covered an election in, we had to track results for almost 60 different elections across three counties. We ran agate for a good portion of those, but that agate didn't compile itself. You think calling coaches on deadline is a pain, try calling city or county clerks, who are swamped themselves and may or may not have just been voted out, a dozen times for updates.

I also had reporters assigned to at least four elections EACH, meaning they were responsible for 10-12 inches of copy on each race by the end of the night. Photographers got art from at least a dozen places each.

And that's not counting paginating the national results. And, it's also not counting the roughly 25 percent of the A section dedicated to non-election stuff. One particular election night, me and one other person paginated six completely blank pages, including A1, in less than a half-hour.

At that same area, sports staffed four high school football games every Friday, and took box scores only for maybe 10-12 more.

 

Only covered one election night party in person. The candidate was a friend and a slam-dunk to win, so it was mostly standing around with a photog and watching things. Around 9:30 or so, the candidate knew we had deadlines coming up, so he had his people do a baloon drop so the shooter could get his jubilation shots and leave.

 

Right.

I'm sure you degrading the difficulty of your co-workers' jobs and mocking their ability to handle deadline greatly increases the camaraderie.

 

Go get some sleep, you trooper!

But don't forget to grab some pizza on your way out ...

 

I know sports staffs who track 60 high school results, plus colleges, plus each writer has covered a game and written up a 14-incher and written up a 10-inch phoner, and copy edited other reporters' stories, and paginated the section which included both the local and late wire stories, all in one night. Oh, and they updated the web site and tweeted during their games as well.

Similar workloads, except the sports guys did it on a regular basis. News folks do it once a year.

 

Good journalists work hard regardless of what they're handling. Bad journalists think they're the only ones who have it rough.

 

No more so when they consider sports to be the toy department.

 

Then why are the good journalists eating the pizza?

 

If they covered 60 high schools, "plus colleges," I'm guessing they covered upwards of 200 local elections. My point stands.

And, I don't know what planet you're on today, but news folks work on deadline a lot more than once a year. The fact that you typed that at all shows a startling lack of understanding about what news folks do.