COVERING Election Day

How often have you worked news side in your career, Baron?

 

Two years, plus pitched in on emergencies and ....Election Night.

 

Did you not work hard those two years? Did you only have two long nights in that time?

 

The reporter I worked with on a six-part series examining every aspect of the finances of each of our three local school districts didn't work that hard because she never wrote a high school football gamer in 20 minutes.

 

Sure, but my experience has been that it's usually one or two reporters who are either covering a board meeting, or late-breaking crime news. They also don't do it every night, unless it's their beat.

A lot different than tracking 60 results a night, writing two stories and a brief, and copy editing, and paginating, on the vast majority of nights. Election night is once a year.

 

Are we defining long nights in terms of writing one story on deadline, or writing two stories, a brief, and taking multiple results?

 

Covering crime and courts, in the absence of major news, I usually wrote three or four 10-inchers, a handful of briefs, and the entire police blotter every day. When that was done, I'd sit and listen to the scanner in case we had to chase a page for something big.

I'm going to bow out of this dick measuring contest, but will just say that the next time you pick this fight, you may want to brush up on at least the bare essentials of the news side first.

 

Our "Projects Editor" used to win multiple awards for their typically two- or three-part monthly series on the same subject each and every month. Of course, that was all they ever wrote. Not like they spent a lot of time on the cops beat, and for the most part, when another reporter would ask them for help with a project, they would be told to write a FOIA letter.

 

Again, sounds like a similar workload to sports. Only much of your stuff was early.

 

So, what do you want? A medal?

Working on deadline "more" doesn't mean you're "better" than anyone else at it. It certainly doesn't mean you're a better journalist.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable anecdote to apply to every news-side employee in the entire field.

 

Baron, why do you think a news sider would refer to sports as the toy department?