During coverage of Tuesday’s US presidential election, one TV commentator flipped through downsized printouts of the next day’s newspaper front pages.
The challenge those papers faced is that it was not yet clear whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton had won – though it sure looked like it would be Trump.
It reminded me of some of the late nights we’ve had here at The Reminder office over the years.
Back when we were a daily newspaper, our printing press situated in the foul-smelling basement of our old building, we would occasionally “hold the paper” – that is, delay our press time – so we could cover major news events taking place at night.
Often this was done for Bomber playoff games. Our sports reporter would attend the game (or listen on the radio if it was a road game) and whip up an article for the next day’s paper by 11 or 12 at night.
We would allot a certain amount of space for those pieces, so it was just a matter of filling in a blank. Whenever possible, other sections of the paper would already be printed.
When it came to holding the paper, we had no firm deadline that I can recall. Sometimes the paper only took three or four hours to print in its entirety, so we could have theoretically been writing until 3 or 4 in the morning if need be, and still have that edition on the street in time for the coffee crowd.
When you’ve written news copy all day, and then come back at night to write more, sometimes you just chug back your Pepsi and do what needs to be done in a rather mundane fashion.
Other times it could be an exhilarating experience harkening back to those old newspaper movies where they’d yell “Stop the press!”
One night that comes to mind was in December 2003. The Creighton school board was meeting and planned to vote to either proceed with, or delay a vote on, their then-controversial expansion into grades 10, 11 and 12.
We held the paper that night, even though I felt the board would vote to delay the matter given all of the public opposition. Instead, they voted to go ahead with the expansion. As I sat in the public gallery, a barely audible “oh my god” slipped out – not because I took a particular position on the issue, but because I was utterly surprised.
Well, that was our front-page story. I began writing my article in my head as I drove back to the office. Three of us – myself, my editor and our layout artist – were there until past 1 am, but just like a big-city daily, we delivered the goods to our readers the following morning.
That’s what we were there for. And that’s what we’re still here for.
Local Angle is published on Fridays.
