An abrupt opportunity dropped in her lap, and after the fact I was able to interview her.
She was young—late 20s—and had been to J-school (Journalism), hired as a cub reporter doing the biggest-fish stories, the dog-who-came-home stories and the weddings. For reasons she could not fathom, she was put in as substitute editor when the current editor of a sister newspaper died.
Why not someone from the sister newspaper? Why not someone who knew something about newspapers?
Here is her story:
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity dropped in my lap last December when I was assigned an interim post as editor of a small-town newspaper.
I had no idea what I was getting into, for I was a novice in the field. My heart connection with newspapers was that I had read them all my life. My professional connection was flimsy—six months out of J-school and hired to write fish stories.
It is now two months later and the new—and permanent—editor has just arrived. His name is Geoffrey something, and he knows what he is doing. He is a newspaper person, trained and tried. I wasn’t. But I am now.
IT is the hardest work I have ever done, and this includes having a new baby and knowing what to do with it; and building a house with my own hands.
It is also the most exhilarating and satisfying work I’ve experienced. It wasn’t like the six-month toil of building a house, and it wasn’t like birthing a baby… although there are similarities to the latter. Every week for 10 weeks I had to birth a newspaper. The first edition I tackled was the Christmas issue. The day it came out, I couldn’t wait to see what I had wrought. I arose early and drove to the nearest newsstand—incognito, like anyone knew or cared.
I could see it in the newsbox from my car. It didn’t look like any front page I’d ever seen. More to the point, it didn’t look like the newspaper I last saw on the board in the lay-out room. The red-clad Santa standing next to the very green Christmas tree covered with red and gold lights was haloed along the masthead with a strand of neon pink Christmas bulbs. The combination was hideous, glaring, childish, cartoonish. “Who in the #$%& did this?” I shouted out loud.
I spent the buck and a quarter for my newspaper, threw it in my car and tore home fuming and cursing. I called the office, but the day after Thursday’s press day, everyone came in late because there really wouldn’t be much to do until Monday. I dressed, grabbed the offensive front page and drove madly for the 20-minute drive that I managed in 10 minutes to the scene of the crime.
Patsy was in the layout room, feet on desk, leafing through the week’s catastrophe.
“Who did this?” I yelled at her as I threw my newspaper on her desk.
She looked up, not removing her feet, not surprised. “The publisher,” she said, and went back to perusing the ads she’d laid out.
Patsy did not look up. “Edward, you know, the publisher.” She folded up her pages, took her feet off the desk and sat up straight. “He came in just after you left and we hadn’t wrapped the front page yet. He studied it, looked up and added the clipart to the masthead, wished us Merry Christmas and left. We finished wrapping up, sent the pages out the door with the courier and went home.”
I sat down in a heap, puzzled. “Why would he do such a thing?”
I shuffled over to my desk, my prideful “Editor’s Desk.” My thoughts skittered around “hubris” and “pride goeth before the fall.” And I was mystified by the interference and ashamed of my first edition. I knew I would be the one ridiculed, questioned, blamed. I cleaned off my desk, told Patsy to leave a note for everyone to go home and left for home myself. As I was going out, the sports editor was coming in. I liked him. He was hard-working. He was amusing. Holding the door for me, he said, “Hey, you put out a newspaper alright!” He flashed a copy at me and went on in.
What he said reminded me of what I thought once about an ugly baby: Well, that’s a baby, alright.
This time, driving slowly, I was a crushed and stupid human being. I wondered about this hi-falutin’ profession of the hallowed First Amendment free speech organ, the Press. It had turned into trash for me, able to be diminished by the guy who published the newspaper, for god’s sake. What was he thinking? Was he trying to make me look bad—did he even know my name?—or was he simply colorblind and cocky? Or more accurately, childish.
When I got home, my husband was all smiles and hiding something behind his back. He brought it out with a flourish: My first front page, framed, my name as editor pro-tem obvious alongside the garish colors of Christmas and Easter combined in one fell swoop. I started weeping and wandered down the hall to go to bed with my shoes on. “Hey, diddle, diddle, my son John,” I thought, as I fell into a nightmarish sleep where I kept trying to tear something apart and it wouldn’t give way to my frantic fingers.
The weekend passed, Monday arrived and reluctantly I walked in the backdoor of the newspaper office to the usual team already at work. I was relieved. It was as if nothing horrible had happened; although as the morning wore on, not quite. The crew tiptoed around me.
I have since learned that there’s always the next issue. I believe that particular sigh of a statement might be the guiding axiom of the newspaper business. With each edition, you know you’re going to do better than the last—no typos, a great front-page pic, a scoop of a story and an editorial that is bound to win the Pulitzer. Or at least photo captions with the correct names of the photographed.
I learned, over the next nine issues of pro-temness that I managed to paste together without mishap, that the goal of perfection is a constant in the newspaper business. It is one of the most endearing—and maddening—of its characteristics.
In a business that runs on urgency, and like any other business must make money to survive, it tries to be perfect. A metal stamping company will be perfect each time, its gadgets unfailingly the same; a newspaper will turn out different paper pages each time.
It does this while trying to maintain a position of integrity, objectivity, careful surveillance of life that is a walk along the razor’s edge. Many people, I have learned, are not ever happy with what is news, how it is presented or with what’s left out.
“Are you just writing sensational news stories to sell your (fill in the blanks) newspaper?”
“How come you can put in a picture of a fish and not a picture of my precious…child, granddaughter’s wedding, new business, bowling team, dog?”
‘What ever happened to the corn and bean prices column? If you don’t get it back in, I’m canceling my subscription.”
And my two favorites: “Why is there so much bad news in your newspaper” and “Why don’t you cover the news?”
No matter its inability to cover the big things in everyone’s life, or the little things, a small-town newspaper, just like the big guys, strives for the highest professionalism in its writing, picture-taking, editing and lay-out. I know, because I watched on one occasion how the crew, in the wee hours, worked on a late-breaking story that took a lot of space so having to keep room for the paid-for ads was a major consideration and manipulation.
They certainly impressed me.
Over the weeks this crew were amazingly patient and instructive with me – they must have torn their hair in private. They laughed a lot. I thought initially they were just a jolly bunch; I soon realized that they often laughed out of hysteria in getting things right.
I also learned that once a paper was put to bed—the term used when all is done and the pages go off to the printer—I went to the bar for a beer with my new friends, then home to bed where my paper was right there with me. I thought about it as I drifted off, I dreamed it—the newspaper nightmare of the obscene headline that somehow got by everyone’s eyes. I awoke each morning with one panicky thought or another: Did I…?
It is not a part-time job nor an eight-to-five job.
It is a way of life.
It became my food and drink, my conversation. It may bore everyone else to death – they’re not in the business. If you’re in it, no matter the department, the conversation eventually returns to the paper of the day.
A small-town newspaper with a crew like this one is fortunate indeed. There was heart to them. I witnessed an entire roomful of them chagrined at a misspelling in a picture caption. And a great deal of grousing because the printing process slipped, and the color photos were out of focus.
The common wisdom about newspapers is—how hard can it be to put out a weekly?
I never dreamed, while occupying the lowliest reporter position, that a once-a-week printing could be a seven-day-a-week job—for the boss/editor. I never really took seriously the meaning of “deadline” before. Deadline to an editor has a very literal connotation: if you don’t meet it, you deserve to die.
I never realized one could have so much fun taking seriously something that gets thrown away so casually.
The AG Central is the newspaper where I learned the newspaper business. My two months interim editorship was a time of unparalleled work and learning—with that one regretful Christmas issue receding from memory as those shining moments of pride wipe out the grind, the routine, the nonsense, the inevitable criticism.
The point of this story? Be kind to your fine-lettered friends, the reporters and their newspapers and magazines. They are the ones for whom the First Amendment to the Constitution of the American Bill of Rights laid down the law for the benefit of a well-informed public: “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the Press… ”…Read more by Colleen O’Brien Clopton