Saturday, December 18, 2010

An Interesting Week

I've had an interesting week.

It started out on Monday when I put in an extra morning's work just to handle two Christmas parades. Naturally, one of the parade organizers didn't get around to sending their information to me until right at the deadline, so it was a frantic half hour of taking in data and getting press ready.

That evening I covered the Covington City School Board meeting, where the superintendent announced they had signed an agreement with the City Manager to put a resource officer in the local high school. The next night I covered the city council meeting when a council member and the city manager had a little debate over the issue, citing what I wrote in my article in that afternoon's paper.

Let me tell you that was an interesting moment. It was the first real bit of controversy that I'd ever stirred, even during my first hitch at the paper. See, the first time around I did mostly sports, a little hard news, and feature stories. This time I have a regular beat to cover and one that I've had very little experience at. In fact, before this week I'd never covered a school board meeting at all. So when the councilman pulled out the newspaper and started off with the words "I read in this afternoon's paper..." I had a brief moment of panic where I prayed that everything was correct in that article. Fortunately it was and the debate that followed had absolutely nothing to do with any error I might have made.

The rest of the week was spent deep in the Christmas spirit. And by deep in the Christmas spirit I mean typing hundreds of letters to Santa that the newspaper receives this time of year. We're one of the very few that runs those letters on Christmas Eve. It's a great tradition and that's why we do it. But behind that great tradition is countless hours of typing until your hand hurts from pounding keys for so long.

In the middle of all this, we had our first real snow of the year Thursday. It amounted to about six or seven inches. At the newspaper, when hell and high water happens, we don't call in. We go take a picture of it. So after getting Bethany to work I plowed my way to the office, where we faced a deadline that was an hour earlier so we could get the carriers off the roads at a decent hour. Everything was going smoothly and we were all just about finished with our assigned sections when a late breaking resignation of a prominent local government figure hit the company e-mail. So there went at least thirty minutes of reading, processing and tearing up Plan A so we could drop back to Plan B on the fly.

And today I'm sitting here, waiting patiently on the obituaries to filter in to my Inbox so I can get out the door and on my way to a very scenic Hot Springs where the Bath County Christmas parade will be taking place.

I'll grant you that this job has it's moments, but it's never quite the same thing from day to day. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it sometimes.

No comments:

Post a Comment