When I moved to Vermont in my 30's, I had a day job -- stories for other times -- and I picked up a job as a stringer for a very local newspaper, The Brattleboro Reformer. It was a part-time gig working on assignments for one editor or another; mostly it meant going to local municipal meetings -- school boards, the select boards, planning commissions -- for the collection of small towns surrounding the big town, population 9000.
It was a good role for me. I'm naturally curious and civic minded. And I had another advantage. When the Editor in Chief shook my hand after I accepted the job offer, he said, "Frank. I want you to be a pain in the ass."
"Stephen," I replied. "I'm your man."
What I didn't have as experience was writing to a deadline. I was used to due dates, which may or may not have been flexible. The Reformer had deadlines. Every night at the stroke of midnight, the presses rolled. The Night Editor described her job as getting the paper out on time and in one piece. Linda spent her evening arranging, rearranging, editing down, sometimes supplementing, the news content, to fit the news hole; that big empty space not filled by ads and other non-news content.
I said the presses rolled at midnight. My deadline was 11pm so the story I'd drafted could be read by two editors, and processed to fit a length specification called column inches.
Adding to these challenges, most of these civic meetings started at 7pm. The meetings were called to order on time: these start times being deadlines of their own, and consequently unfolded at the pace of democracy.
Fortunately, the local officials running them had day jobs, too, so had their own motives for bringing meetings to conclusions by a reasonable time. However, concluding at 8:30 or 9:00 was common. Since these meetings had no deadline, sometimes they kept going. Then there might be the need to ask questions for clarification. Stephen was a stickler for full names and correct spellings. I'm looking at you, Colonel Llewellyn Sorenson, Colonel being his first name and not a title. Then up to a half hour drive to the newsroom to type a story into a primitive word processor connected to the newsroom's network.
Linda gave me the news hole target, and I conveyed the high points of democracy to fit that space in maybe 40 minutes. While I was working, Jeopardy was on the newsroom television, and Linda and Mark were competing against the contestants and each other.
The thinking was high stakes and under pressure. The stakes included knowing I would encounter the citizens who had attended the meeting, knew who had said what to whom, and often were the who or whom. They also may have been a who or whom, to whom, I may have been a pain in the ass.
All of that cognition was done under the metacognition of the deadline, and Linda was our captain, oh captain, of the deadline.
With the help of two excellent editors, I never missed a deadline. A couple of times, though, I was afraid my brain would break.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper