On the beaten path

> A plane crashed at the airport in Lake Clear, killing a Saranac Lake man.

> A major agreement was reached to help bring cell-phone coverage to the Northway.

> The Essex County manager won his lawsuit against the county.

> A car hit a stopped Ticonderoga school bus, seriously injuring the mother and daughter in the car.

> The Supreme Court made a landmark ruling on abortion that is of great interest to local pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

> Commonwealth Home Fashions, a major industry in Willsboro, laid off 12 people and rumors spread quickly that they would close.

> Some kind of disturbance happened at the prison in Ray Brook.

> The Mountain Lake PBS transmitter tower on Lyon Mountain collapsed.

You can imagine the scrambling that went on in the newsroom as one after another of these stories broke through the day.

Kim Smith Dedam, Joe LoTemplio, Andrea Van Valkenburg, Alvin Reiner and Lohr McKinstry all had to drop what they were doing and try to track down what they could on these stories.

Kim, who was all set to head out to Tupper Lake, instead rushed to Adirondack Airport.

It's part of our job to write about deaths or serious accidents, but it's not easy. It wouldn't be an easy day for Kim, but we knew it would be a whole lot harder day for family and friends of the person who died.

Joe, Andrea, Alvin and Lohr began making all kinds of phone calls to find out about the cell agreement, Commonwealth layoffs, abortion-ruling reaction, car-bus accident and county lawsuit.

On some of these stories, sources were hesitant to part with information. That makes it difficult when readers are not only expecting to read details the next morning but also checking our Web site throughout the day, looking for breaking news.

We love our growing ability to get news up onto the Web, but we are careful that we don't rush so much that we are inaccurate. Some news organizations want bragging rights to getting a story posted first; we want to be able to say we got it right first.

This is what makes the news business so exciting, even in a relatively small community such as the North Country. It stretches us, sometimes beyond what we think we're capable of, but we try to meet the challenge because people count on us to tell them what's happening around here.

Most people have a pretty good idea, when they go to work in the morning, how they're going to be spending their day. Monday was a prime example of why we never do.