The Eternal Optimist

OK, maybe it wasn’t quite prehistoric, but today was an adventure (and a long one).

To start with, we had a new copy editor beginning today so I had my first shot at helping to train someone. (I kept hoping I wasn’t accidentally giving him any wrong information.)

Then, about the time his training for today finished and we expected our big influx of stories for the paper … the power went out. At first we assumed this was something with our floor or building. It turns out it was a much larger problem requiring the assistance of the utility company.

As of now (12:30 a.m.), word is that power won’t be back up and running until tomorrow night at the earliest. I still don’t know what caused the outage, but a huge group of office buildings (and Harris Teeter, plus quite possibly homes) were affected.

So, someone found a conference room at a building about five blocks away, and the production crew and editors lugged our laptops through the 96-degree heat. When we walked outside, it was pretty chaotic. Everyone was leaving the office buildings at once and cars were jamming the streets with lines of cars leading out of parking garages.

Once we got to our remote location, we discovered we had Internet access but no access to our servers and database systems, which we had been counting on. So we published the paper via emailed Word document, edited, then copied and pasted into InDesign. And we had to rig a few logos in unpretty ways, too, since we had no access to our stock images. Plus, we couldn’t access any stories we had edited earlier in the day.

We got a 2-hour deadline extension and somehow we (barely) made that deadline. I got home around 11:40 p.m.

And while tomorrow should be better since we have warning, we will almost certainly be at an offsite location again. What a way to return from a holiday weekend!

Congratulations to the Post-Dispatch, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting!

My parent company is The Economist Group. I hadn’t read “The Economist” magazine much at all until I got here, but now I’ve picked it up (for free, of course) each week and found some interesting stories.

This story at VanityFair.com attempts to explain why “The Economist” is so successful. (I discovered it through Romenesko.) It also has some funny quotes such as: “The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks — millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride.”

Friday signaled the start of my first Congressional recess. Congress will be gone for two weeks, which means I should be less busy at work. Typically, we only publish a print edition one day a week during recess. The other days, I’m still responsible for editing and posting Web stories, but the workload should be much less than a typical week. Of course, if big news happens, that would change. But in general I’ll be working shorter days, and my department will be catching up on housekeeping, etc., during our spare time.

But first, more work
Before I could fully enjoy the recess, I was “on duty” this weekend for the paper. This means I was responsible for editing and posting any Web stories that come in Saturday or Sunday, and also preparing the site for Monday’s paper. (Luckily, I can do this from home or a laptop with an Internet card.) Of course, since recess had begun, it was a pretty quite weekend. I posted a couple stories Saturday and a few more Sunday, then shuffled a few things on the homepage.

However, since I wanted to be fully prepared on my first weekend, I stuck around my apartment most of the time. It made for a very calm weekend, but it also allowed me to sort through bills and take care of my to-do list.