a day in the life of a newsie

The 24-hour newspaper life

By Sara Clemence and J.Wes Yoder, Anniston Star Staff Writers

Senior Writer Matthew Korade talks to a source as he searches for information online. Most reporters have to multi-task to get jobs done by deadline.

6 a.m. Before dawn, the phones come on in the circulation department. Staffers will answer customer complaints and concerns until 6 p.m.

8 a.m. The sun has risen. It’s a quiet, overcast day, and the newsroom is nearly empty. Many reporters were working late last night, covering community meetings or, in Matt Creamer’s case, reporting on a murder in Heflin.

Brandon Tubbs, the police reporter, walks in at 8:05. Anthony Cook, The Star’s metro editor, sits down at his desk, turns on his computer, flips on the radio and opens the paper.

Online director Geni Certain has been working from home since about 7, making sure The Star’s Web site is working properly and answering reader e-mails.

8:30 Tubbs places his first call of the day, trying to get more information on the murder.

9-10 a.m. The parking lot is filling up, as is the coffee pot. Some reporters sit down to stories they already have started. Some start making phone calls, looking for something to report. Others are out on assignment. Jennifer Ginsberg, the new education reporter, is out meeting with a school principal.

In advertising, Carol Christopher, is checking the phone, fax and e-mail for new classified ads.

10:30 Cook kicks off the morning budget meeting, where editors discuss the stories of the day. They are gathered around a long table in the yellow-and-green conference room, each with a list of the day’s stories — the “budget” — in front of them.

The news stories come from the reporters, who are constantly trolling their beats for information.

The biggest piece for the week is an investigative series by one of the justice reporters. The editors want to hold it to make sure it is flawless but wonder if they risk getting scooped by another paper, since it is a statewide story. It is saved for a future issue.

Cook says the story of the day is the murder. The room goes quiet when he explains what is known and says that there may be more developments.

Next, some back and forth on whether a church controversy is a news story or a feature for the faith section.

“We’re going to need a decision here, folks,” says Troy Turner, managing editor.

“Well, we don’t know enough to say yet,” says Catherine Downing, the features editor.

Just then, Laura Tutor, the assistant features editor, comes in with news about a second church. It’s now a trend, so the article is put under features.

Throughout the meeting, editors discuss possible art to accompany the text. Turner asks again whether there is art for the investigative story. Photos were shot the week before.

Every day, reporters submit requests to the photography department, and they try to meet demand. Sometimes, the paper will use a photo that comes from a source or that has come off the newswire.

11 a.m. There is a low buzz to the newsroom. Reporters still are making calls, and two of the four televisions are tuned to cable news stations.

11:30 a.m. Brandon Tubbs still is following up on the murder, interviewing people over the phone and trying to piece together what happened.

Nobody can say officially how the victims were killed. They can speculate, but the cause of death has to be confirmed by the county coroner.

“Criminals sometimes use one act to cover another,” Tubbs explains. Among the people he has called: police departments, the coroner, the sheriff’s office. “I’m waiting for everyone to call me back.”

“So far the coffee pot has been filled three times,” Matt Creamer, the chemical weapons reporter, observes wryly.

Over in advertising, Carol Christopher, classified executive, is calling clients, trying to sell and confirm ad space.

“Sometimes it’s a nice surprise; sometimes it’s a nasty shock,” she says.

The advertising department is on the far end of two long hallways from the newsroom, the long walk emphasizing the distance between the two. The reporters and editors don’t know what ads are being sold, and the ad people don’t know what stories are being written. The advertising staff has nothing to do with delivery either.

“If they don’t get the paper on time, you get an earful about that, Christopher says. “We’re kind of the listening post.”

12:30 Jennifer Ginsberg begins writing her education story.

2 p.m. Tubbs has spoken with the father of the woman who was killed.

“It’s one of those things that you hate to have happen, and you hate to have to call those people,” he says. But talking to people who knew a victim “tells me who this person was, which is what I’m trying to convey to the reader.”

On the other side of a partition, Laura Tutor is working on the church story.

“Preachers are the worst to try and get in touch with,” she says, clutching the phone book in one hand.

2:30 p.m. Bill Edwards, features copy editor, is putting together an extra television page, since this is the start of the new season. He also spends time taking entertainment stories off the newswire. Often, he has to edit them to fit the available space, taking some paragraphs out and moving others around.

“It’s like packing a suitcase,” he says, pulling off his Walkman headphones. “You find nooks and crannies to put things in.”

In his office, Troy Turner is just getting to his mail, which sits in a big pile on his desk.

“It’s an even bigger pile in e-mail,” he says. He spends his days in meetings, answering reader mail, dealing with personnel problems, and planning ahead for the paper (he has three calendars in his office).

“My biggest job is to coordinate among all my departments — news, features, sports, design, photography — and coordinate with the other departments,” he says.

3 p.m. The classified ads section is finished, and will be printed at 3:30.

Janet Miller, an account executive in advertising, is usually out talking to clients by this time.

“I try to get to know the customer so I can help them sell their product,” she says. She finds out what is selling and what they need to sell so they can come up with a strategy. Then she works with the designers to come up with the ad.

“Creativity is the thing I like about doing advertising,” she says. “Should it have a football theme? Logos?”

3:45 p.m. The food section is finished; Lela Davis, who builds pages for the section, uploads the stories to the Web site. The commentary section is close. News will be a few hours.

4 p.m. Deadlines are looming. Most of the reporters are sitting at their desks trying to write up their stories.

Downstairs in the production department, staffers are getting ready for the print runs.

A ribbon of yesterday’s paper weaves through the monstrous press, which is being cleaned.

Johnny Galloway sits before a row of black IBM computers and colorful iMacs, sending files to huge negative printers in the next room.

“Hopefully, everything will come out right on the press,” he says.

In the next room, beneath yellowish lights, Ronald Edwards takes a newspaper-sized negative and a large metal plate and places them in the plate burner. Thirty seconds later, the plate comes out looking like The Jacksonville News has been projected into it.

The press uses four colors of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black Each color needs a plate.

“They call it cyan, but we call it blue,” Edwards chuckles. “We’re still country.”

Upstairs, in circulation, customers are calling in with concerns, complaints and requests for new subscriptions.

“It’s nonstop,” says Deborah Brown, quality assurance manager.

Back in the newsroom, Phillip Tutor, the news editor, is looking lost.

“I can’t find the emergency editorial,” he says. It’s a timeless editorial that is kept in case news developments make a current editorial wrong or irrelevant. It’s never been used, and hopefully this won’t be the night it’s needed.

4:30 p.m. Another budget meeting, but this one is different. For starters, the evening shift has come in — the sports editor, the assistant metro editor, business editor.

And this time, the editors are reviewing what they have for the next day’s paper, and where it will appear.

There are still no suspects in the Heflin murder, but the story is still important.

“It’s going to have some pretty hard-hitting info,” says Anthony Cook, metro editor.

The story is designated as the lead, the top of the front page. A chemical weapons story also will go on page one, along with a weight-loss story from the newswire.

“It’s one of those ‘Hey Martha!’-type stories,” Turner says. The attention-getting kind, is what he means.

A story on Toyota gets shifted from the business page to the regional news page, since that will be the first page of the section. Ginsberg’s education story is held until there is a photo to go with it.

Local photos are a general problem for the next day.

“Any good wire art?” Turner asks.

5:30 p.m. The editorial section, crossword answers and calendar for the next day go up on the Web site, along with the photos for the food section. The other parts of the paper will be put on the site when they are finished later in the night.

Tubbs sets out on his police rounds, picking up the reports for the day. He usually leaves at 1 p.m., and tries to get back by 3 p.m. to make phone calls. He stops at the Anniston Police Department first, and flips through the sheaf of papers in the car.

“The followup turned out to be an all-day thing,” he laments as he drives his red Grand Am down Quintard. “You’ve just got to work until you get what you need.”

6 p.m. Tubbs arrives at the house of the man whose daughter and grandchildren were murdered. Neighbors and family members are sitting on the big porch.

“I hate to meet you all under these conditions,” Tubbs says, shaking hands.

The father is out back feeding a black-and-white pony. He hands Tubbs a photo of his daughter, and Tubbs sets it down on a table to try to photograph the photograph. A little boy calls two puppies to him, and the trio start chasing each other around the house.

The man says he was unhappy with part of the first story on the murder.

“I’ll see what I can do,” says Tubbs. Looking around at the property, he says, “It looks like you’ve got a lot here a man could be proud of.”

The man is silent. Tubbs puts a hand on his shoulder.

“God bless you,” he says, and gets back in the car so he can finish his story at the office.

7 p.m. till midnight From 7 p.m. until after midnight, the newsroom is awake, but quiet. Night editors read news stories, checking for any errors or inconsistencies that threaten to slip into print.

“We’re like the final defense for the reader,” says Melissa Cosper, assistant news editor, who proofreads local and wire stories before arranging them on her computer for press. Like several other news and sports editors, she writes headlines for stories and captions for pictures. As a final precaution, editors review each others’ pages.

“There are two sets of eyes on every page, if not more,” Cosper says.

10:30 p.m. At the sports desk, Bran Strickland is writing Player of The Week summaries. His day started at 1 p.m.

All the while, other area papers are being printed by The Star’s press and shipped by dozens of people who sleep during the day.

12:30 a.m. Web producer Chris Luker is just arriving. With the sports pages ready to print, he can start uploading the stories and photos for that section. He works fast because online readers are already looking for the news, but he’ll be here until nearly dawn. By the time he’s done, he’ll have put the day’s sports and entertainment stories online, added links to other stories, checked the photos in all the sections, updated the lottery numbers, and created an on-line poll with one of the stories.

1:15 a.m. The Jacksonville News, The Daily Home, The Coosa Valley Advantage and The St. Clair Times, more than 50,000 copies, have left the building.

Upstairs, Cosper and the other night editors have finished the newspaper layout and send it electronically from their computers to computers in the press room.

There, men begin converting the newspaper pages from the computer screens to burnt images on wide sheets of metal. They are swift and their movements are crisp, but they are running late. An hour and a half late.

“We’ve had a learning curve,” says Donald Jones, a press supervisor who says running the old press was second nature.

The men move faster, fitting the sheets to the press, their footsteps lost in the constant drone of the machine. The monotony of the sound, like that of a pressurized airplane cabin, is broken every so often by the clang of metal sheets being tossed from the top of the machine to the concrete floor.

1:30 a.m. Bran Strickland is taking a final look at high school football statistics before going home.

“Fall is brutal,” he says.

On the loading dock, 15 or so mailroom workers, mostly women, are smoking cigarettes, sitting on concrete steps and sharing a tray of Chewy Chips Ahoys. A middle-aged woman has taken the only chair, a carryover from the old building. It has a rip in the cushion. She leans against the brick, missing the old nights on 10th Street.

“It’s too quiet; you can’t see no cars up here,” says the woman. For the last 1,000 days, with the help of a machine, she has placed an insert into most every Anniston Star. But she would rather not see her name — or her picture — in newspaper ink.

2:05 a.m. The bells sound, and the press — 164 feet of knobs and levers and metal bread pins — rolls.

“Let’s go,” yells a supervisor, and half-smoked cigarettes are put out.

The Anniston Star, almost seven copies a second, spit from the press and scurry on conveyor belts to the mailroom.

Press operators check the paper’s color.

“More yellow,” says Nathan Hubbard, pressing a series of buttons to brighten a picture of a man playing a flute.

Beside a long machine, mailroom workers stack inserts in metal grooves that drop the extras in the papers as fast as they roll by.

“I could speed it up,” says Joann Drake, a mailroom supervisor who controls the rate of the machine. “But we got a good-looking bundle coming out. If we turn it up, things might be hanging out the side, looking all raggedy.”

2:15 a.m. Large trucks have already left with papers. One to the Conoco on Route 77 in Lincoln, one to the Winn Dixie in Coldwater, another to Pickette’s Grocery in Munford. There, carriers meet in the darkness to load their cars for paper routes.

2:50 a.m. Other carriers pick up their bundles at The Star. Eager to get started on his route, Lin Bridges pulls his Ford Escort up to the loading dock half an hour early. He wears Liberty overalls and drinks black coffee. He is 65 and says the hour before dawn, when “you can’t even hear a bird,” is the finest time to be alive.

“It’s enough to charge anybody’s battery,” he says.

Bridges waits on the dock beside a woman carrier who has been known to throw a fit when the papers are slow coming.

“You think people are nicer up in Sand Mountain?” Bridges asks her.

“I do,” she says.

Clyde Lewis, a district manager, takes call after call from frustrated carriers in Pell City and Bynum who are waiting for paper trucks. The tension, Lewis said, is only a result of workers wanting to do their jobs well, wanting to make readers happy.

“Whatever it takes,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

3:50 a.m. Billy Gober, 71, and his wife leave the loading dock in their Chevy S-10 pickup with a pile of papers under the camper top. Although there are no other vehicles in sight, Gober stops at a stop line in The Star parking lot, then proceeds slowly. In Oxford, he drops papers at the Grub Mart, then the China Luck restaurant, then the Waffle House. While he puts a bundle in the box outside the Waffle House, his wife waits in the cab, hands folded in her lap.

“I go with him to keep him safe, to keep him from driving so fast. Sometimes,” she said, “he will roll through a stop sign.”

4:30 a.m. Hervey Folsom, a part-time customer representative for the circulation department, arrives at work. In the next few hours, she will take dozens of complaint calls from Star readers. Some are understanding. Others say things like, “Okay woman, where’s my paper!” she said.

The number of calls tells Folsom that people care about their newspaper. For her, that makes it worth enduring the occasional berating for something she has no control over, a new press machine who’s efficiency has not been honed.

“There’s just something about being around a newspaper,” she said, alert and smiling at an hour when most people are dreaming. “With the phone ringing all the time, it’s exciting.”

4:40 a.m. Press operator Nathan Hubbard washes ink from his hands with Cherry Bomb soap in a deep-well sink, and goes home.

In the hour before sunup, Adam Lawson, a dock supervisor, waits for one last truck to come back. The mailroom is dark, and the dock is quiet. Soon, reporters and advertising salespeople will wake up and come to work — their carpeted workplace a world Lawson knows little about.

“We never see anybody from up there,” he said.

6:30 a.m. Bran Strickland is back at work, driving to Wadley to preview the week-end’s high school football showdown with top-ranked Notasulga. Meanwhile, Mary Stanley is pulling a waste bin around the workplace.

“Clean the bathrooms, take out the trash,” she said, cheerful in the lonely hour.

An hour later at the Waffle House in Oxford, customers read the paper and talk about the top story in The Star, Brandon Tubbs’ report on the Heflin murder.

“I just don’t see how anyone could kill a 6-year-old boy and walk away and live with them-selves,” one woman says to a waitress.

Wendell McDaniel, a manager at Kitchens, scans the story over a plate of eggs, frustrated that the police don’t have a suspect in the killing.

“It’s the hottest news story,” he said. “But you’re still not getting a lot of information.”