Back in February, Steve Blust, Executive Editor of the Beaufort Gazette, offered to the blogosphere the ability to spend a week as a guest editor. I took him up on it, and he took me up on it. So, the Week of April 16, I spent an hour a day at the Gazette offices while they set up the paper for the next day. I want to thank Steve, and Chris Passante, and the other members of the crew, Ian, Dave, Lisa, Nicole and everyone whom I forget to mention, for tolerating the intrusion of an opinionated newbie to their daily confab.
Monday started with Steve explaining his role. and mine, and the role of the Guest Editor, along with the philosophy of the paper which is local first, learn what people don't already know from electronic media and internet, and be interesting. I would receive a daily 'budget' of news stories from which to pick, or I could suggest my own from other sources. The true power of the press lies not in the editing of the paper, but in the preparation of the news budget. If an item is not in the news budget, then it will not likely make it in the paper - or in any other media for that matter. This is probably left to interns and fresh kids out of school, but I never found out where the news budgets actually come from before they make it to the Gazette, except in a general sense, i.e., the NY ro LA times, McClatchy - Tribune, etc. Fox is not on the list. Maybe they should be.
Anyway, Monday April 16 started off with a bang. [after reading this I realize this is a poor choice of words - edited] VA Tech and the associated stories dominated this news day. We discussed how to handle this story in the coming days as it was a major event nationally. We also had the big windstorms in Bft, fires, and the McKinney murder trial started.
Tuesday had a local murder trial continuing, along with the identity of the VTech murderer. A murder trial in a town of 12000 in a county of 100,000 is a big deal.
Wednesday looked boring, until NBC broke its' story about receiving the VTech video, and the hour's work was for naught as events took over the lead stories for the next day with the VTech rant and video.
Thursday started the build-up the Airshow, which ended up of course being the second major national story of last week. The Blue Angels arrived and the candidates for local elections began taking center stage in Beaufort, while the guilty verdict in the McKinney trial was reported and photographed by the photog and reporters - whom I never got to meet since they were likely all out in the field in the middle of the afternoon.
Friday ended the week with a discussion of the coverage of the upcoming Marine Corps Airshow, other pending stories to be covered on the weekend, and we had a very interesting exchange on the story concerning the Iraq stories reported in the front section on Sat am. These included the wall being built around Baghdad neighborhoods and how it contrasted with the happy news coming from the administration. Also in the paper was a story about how the military is giving up on Iraqification. The news room thought these last were important national stories which contrasted strongly with the stated reasons for the surge into Iraq. A few members of the newsroom staff thought these were important stories and would be important stories in the coming weeks. Yet, they were no in the NY Times or LA times last week.
I know that my thoughts were taken seriously. I have different leanings than most newsroom people being conservative, and I trolled the news those days to learn as much as I could as to what was going on in the world, national, region and locally so I could make a constructive contribution. I did add or move a story in importance once or maybe twice, the first time was that they Gazette seemed to forget that April 17 was tax day this year; they must have all had their returns done by then!
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