The best place to be
Add comment November 4th, 2008
I’ve been in some newsroom somewhere on election nights since 1970. There is no better place to be. Some things have changed beyond recognition. Back then, we counted resulted by hand, added them on spreadsheets with calculators and prayed we’d get enough results to be able to declare winners for the next day’s newspaper. It was not unusual to go to press with less than 70 percent of the vote counted. I can remember as recently as the early 1990s, when we had yards and yards of blank newsprint circling the walls of the newsroom, each with a different race being tallied by hand.
Today, it’s all electronic. Quieter, quicker, less frenzied, far more accurate, and, yes, a bit less exciting.
There are things that have never changed. Pizza remains the junk food of choice in every newsroom. And, not the healthy kind. The news report remains fundamentally “who beat,” with enough “people on the street” reporting to keep the numbers from bumping together.
It’s always electrically quiet in the newsroom between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on election night The reporting is done, the polls are closing, the plans are in place. Those who went home to take a nap are heading back in. Preliminary page designs, which used to hang on the walls, now sit in their electronic file folders. (And, yes, we have two different ones ready, depending on the outcome. In 2000, we had three….)
The late shifts await the onslaught of results, stories, photos — and now videos and interactive graphics — that must all be processed in just a couple hours. We wander aimlessly and do stuff at our desks that we probably ought to have done several weeks ago but just didn’t have the quiet moments to do. I’ve been reviewing the 2009 budget and writing operational plans. Not exciting, but necessary, and well, it occupies the brain until the results first trickle, then flood, in.
I can hear the ebb and flow of laughter in the newsroom and the clicking of keyboards. A walk through the newsroom shows desktop PCs with Facebook pages, an rrstar.com election site, a photo gallery probably from a family event, a story from the New York Times and another from Fox News. Killing time. Now I smell the pizza. That means we are close to 7 p.m. and an hour closer to “back to work.”
Thirty eight years of election nights. Each with its own personality. All with one thing in common: On these nights, the people with whom I work do good stuff.
