8/3/08
No matter what the publication, the day before you “put it to bed” is quite exciting. At a daily, you obviously have the excitement each day, which actually takes away from some of the excitement. At a Sunday paper, like The Observer, it only comes once a week – but man does it come. Today was filled with lingo that non journalists cannot even imagine. Shouts of “Who’s clear?” “Are the boards read?” “Who’s on man of the match?” rang out from all directions.
One Saturday I would like to stay until the bitter end to see how it all completely comes together. Today I just decided to stay until about 7 when they told me to go home.
I actually got to work on things that are going to appear in tomorrow’s paper, which is awesome. I won’t have my byline or anything, but I will know that certain nuggets came directly from me. For instance, they are running a feature about floodlights in Sports. And as I said earlier this week, I did a lot of research for that article. Today I got to proofread the story on layout boards. It is a two-page spread complete with a chart that describes some floodlight history. Some of my wording from my research will be in tomorrow’s Observer. I have been published before, even large feature articles complete with my byline, but I have never had work appear in a publication of this magnitude. This is one of the most reputable newspaper companies in the world (the Guardian just won another international award for design last week).
The other sweet thing I got to do today was enter some information into the actual document of the Sport section. They run millions of graphics and lineups and scores every week that require grunt work to enter. So I did the grunt work of entering some of the lineups for this week’s games. But still, I was in control of that small piece of the paper. On my computer screen was a page of one of the most widely read papers in the country. It was like having a behind-the-scenes look. That’s pretty sweet. Hopefully I will have the chance to add even more of my own material into later editions. We’ll see.
This post's title links to the Sport section.
Comments Welcome,
Andrew
2 comments:
Just read the "End of the dark ages" feature. I think it's classic Brits that they had the opportunity to lead the way in sports lighting but instead ended up late to the party.
Also, you probably should have mentioned to Jon Henderson that no one in America watches F1 racing.
What makes a victory "famous" to Brits? Can you figure that out for me? They throw that word around much more than we do.
Paul,
The Brits are just too stuck in tradition I think, which prevents innovation. What I think Henderson was trying to say was that F1 would be secure if people in the States got excited about it. I'll work on famous victories.
Post a Comment