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Election Day very busy - at its end
By LOIS CLERMONT
News Editor
You would think Election Day is incredibly busy for a newspaper — and it is, but all the action takes place in a span of about three hours.
I’m sitting here right now (10 a.m.) in an empty newsroom. I’m in for a few hours to do a morning cop check and to get the stories ready for Wednesday’s A3. That page — and many others in the paper — will need to get edited, designed and processed early so we aren’t overwhelmed when the real work starts tonight.
The reporters and photographers won’t start work today until 4 or 5 p.m. Along with the editors and design/production team, they will be here late tonight. We will work until about 1 a.m.
Having a presidential election going on, while certainly exciting, doesn’t add all that much to the newsroom workload. We are planning a local reaction story, which will likely have to be done late tonight, but we don’t do any actual coverage of the race. Many people don’t realize that.
The Associated Press, the biggest and most respected news service in the world, will provide our major news stories for tomorrow. Late tonight, someone will be writing a headline that either John McCain or Barack Obama has won the election. (We hope that race will be decided by press time, anyway; it didn’t go so smoothly with Bush and Gore last time).
What will keep us busy is the local races. It’s actually a very thin year.
There are times when every town in Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties has races, along with county legislatures and the City Common Council.
Those years are stressful for weeks in advance of Election Day because our reporters profile the candidates of all major (mayor, supervisor, village board, town council) contested local races, along with state races that have competition.
You wouldn’t believe how many phone calls it can take to track down a couple of town council candidates and get them to answer a few questions.
Anyway, starting when the polls close at 9 tonight, it will be quite busy here. We will report 31 local races, some with full stories requiring late-night interviews.
Fortunately, we have a veteran editing/design staff and a great team of experienced reporters working tonight: Lohr McKinstry, Denise Raymo and Sue Botsford (in from retirement) handling county election results, Joe Lotemplio and Andrea Van Valkenburg on the Family Court judge race, Dan Heath and Kim Smith Dedam watching the congressional race, and Steve Bartlett, with help from Contributing Writer Ryan Hutchins, looking for reactions to the presidential race.
It will be three hours of straight-out action, with the most intensive work coming in the final hour.
It’s real deadline writing and editing, the kind you see in the movies.
And, boy, do we love it.
