The other day, an islander asked if I’d just come back from a vacation — noting that, after a couple of weeks with few bylines by me, the paper that week was suddenly full of stories I’d written.
I appreciated her thought, but the question made me realize how mysterious our sausage-making can be.
That’s because I work just as much each week, whether I write five stories or no stories. When you see mostly others’ bylines in the newspaper, I’m editing articles, the Happenings calendar, commentaries and letters to the editor; interviewing, researching and writing for future articles; managing special sections such as Destination Vashon and the Grad Tab; planning our coverage for events months in advance; communicating with readers; poring over records requests and budgets; posting stories to, and moderating, our social media; and doing whatever else the paper demands.
In fact, editions full of my byline — such as last week’s and this week’s — tend to involve me covering positive community events, taking lots of photos and completing monstrously long stories with which I’ve spent months battling. Those are some of the best parts of the job, which pluck me from the soft cushion of my office chair and drop me all around the island with my phone, camera and reporter’s notebook.
Trickier are the parts of the job you don’t see. We spend hours sorting through police crime reports, public officials’ emails and other records requests, following leads that go down bizarre rabbit holes and building trust with sources who have an important story to tell but a fear of retaliation. Much of this work never produces a story. But searching through these needlestacks is how we get a lot of good stories, like last week’s piece on the sale of Misty Isle Farms property.
Inevitably, things slips through our fingers, such as a town hall hosted last Friday by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
We would have loved to cover Jayapal’s event, but no one on The Beachcomber’s staff knew it was happening. We weren’t give any heads up from the representative, and we appeared to not be on the right email list to learn about the event, which wasn’t promoted on the representative’s social media. Frustrating, but it happens, and it’s a learning moment — our communication will be better with the representative and her office going forward.
Journalism can be like food service. You have dozens of urgent tasks to complete, and the manic scramble to produce a professional, accurate, comprehensive product is simultaneously exhausting and electrifying.
Well, here’s a brief look into our kitchen: Our week is anchored on Tuesdays, when Beachcomber staff lay out that week’s paper with the help of Sound Publishing’s regional design staff. (You can thank our layout designer Janelle for the paper’s crisp appearance.) We assign stories to pages, print out rough drafts, and everyone in the office picks up a pen and reads the entire paper, line-by-line, to catch typos, grammatical errors, shaky factual claims or confusing phrases.
After we’ve confirmed everything and sent the paper off to be printed, reporter Liz Shepherd and I get to working on next week’s paper. We spend the rest of the week following up on tips, attending public meetings, scheduling interviews and inspecting records.
A Saturday or Sunday can be a day off, or it can bring ten hours of work. It all depends what’s going on — such as, say, a major protest landing on the same Saturday as high school graduation.
On Monday, we push to get all our stories wrapped up. We call and email sources to confirm final details. We trim and clean submitted content, like sports coverage or opinion pieces. Sometimes news breaks on a Monday night or Tuesday morning … so we scramble and do what we can.
By this process, we produce 52 newspapers per year. It feels a bit miraculous in retrospect.
We who claim to be a source of authority for a community should be transparent about our work. So let me know if these reflections are interesting or entertaining, and I’ll share more of them.
Alex Bruell is the editor of the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber.