Deadlines: Ick

I think one of the most annoying parts of being a reporter is the phone. I hate calling people as it is, but even more so, I hate waiting for people to call me back. I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk floating around the internet hoping that people call me back before deadline. A lot of times, I get right down to the wire before people decide to call me back.

Working on a Tuesday deadline when stuff happens Monday doens't help. For example, the state Department of Education recently released its state aid figures. We were told this on Tuesday, which is NOT fun when you're working on a Tuesday deadline. Because the paper was half done and my editor was on vacation, the stand-in editor elected to hold the state aid story for next week. So far, the other papers we rival with have covered the state aid story. It's the one drawback of being a weekly paper, that we can't be as timely as other papers because of our deadlines.

My paper is particular makes that frustrating because our deadline is Tuesday but the paper doens't come out until Thursday. So when things happen on Wednesday, we're still pretty much stuck.

Deadlines are a necessary evil though, and probably the most important part of journalism. If you don't make a deadline, you don't tell the news on time. Simple as that. News is fleeting in today's society. With masters of technology like the web and television, news papers have a difficult time being first in line with headlines. It's even tougher when you're pitting weekly papers like us against a daily paper like The Times.

Here's our benefit though: Because we're a weekly paper, our life is a lot calmer. Yes, we scramble to meet our deadlines, especially when we have trouble getting people to call us back. A lot of people are leary of the media, and when you look at what goes on in today's society, who can blame them? But it's calmer because our stories are often calmer. We have time to dig into personal, local stories and tell the homey stories that daily papers often don't bother with. We're able to give voice to the local people that might be overlooked by the daily papers and by television news casts.

Deadlines aren't fun (unless you love to work under pressure), but they are necessary. Without them, chaos in the newsroom ensues. And folks, chaos is a lot less fun than deadlines.