Working the beat in news

Did A1 on Monday night. Ferguson decision wasn't announced until almost 9:30, so we just ran the CP we had ready by 6 and put the news in the briefs.

 

We had local high school football team advancing in the state playoffs as a centerpiece. Photog sent action art at 9:30, which we used for the centerpiece for the first edition. Game ended at 9:50, reporter sent a running gamer at 10:05, page was sent to press at 10:25. Then we ripped it up for emotional art, and a gamer with quotes for second edition.

Oh, and we had three other pages as well to put out during that time.

We do that every Friday and Saturday during playoff season. Usually happens during the season on Friday nights as well. That's just for football. Winter seasons are rough because every game is at night.

 

You can't be this dense, right?

 

What is so dense about it? You provided an example. I provided examples in which I do the same thing you do, only quite more frequently.

 

A 46-page agenda sounds like there should be at least one, if not several stories, that should be covered at the meeting.

 

And in your world, the reporter in question should be able to identify those stories in, what, three minutes? Or are you willing to give them five?

 

As for the original question, this always sounds like a good idea, but I always thought -- and granted, I never was a newsside beat reporter -- along the same lines you do, of why on earth would someone who doesn't know a reporter from Adam give that guy any information at all, let alone the kind of sensitive information around which an enterprise story can be built? Moreover, why should readers trust what the newspaper says about a topic that in theory they've never written about before?

The equation inherently requires sources, which don't just magic themselves up out of nowhere. And given that a deeply researched, 30-inch story worth reading generally requires more than a day to write, what's going in the paper on those other days?

 

His original point is that they want to go away from meeting coverage and into enterprise reporting. Seems to me it would imply there isn't much going on in the meetings, which is why I wondered why it would take an hour to go through the agenda.

If there is a lot going on with the meetings, then maybe they're important enough to cover instead of doing enterprise.

Had he said, "spend an hour going through a 46-page agenda", then I wouldn't have to wonder why it took an hour to go through the agenda.

 

Send Baron a council meeting packet with 10 agenda items and he'll either write 10 great stories, or learn from the ones he got wrong.

Send him a council meeting packed with 50 agenda items and all he's trying to do is get the work done because he's feeling overwhelmed.

 

POY

 

Of course, you ignore that reporters only write a few stories, and blog about a couple of others from a meeting anyways as a typical workload. For your spoof on my previous post to make sense, a student would be able to pick and choose, say, five or six questions to answer out of 50.