Nobody died. That sits at the top of the three accomplishments I can be proud of looking back on my short stint as editor of The Evening Sun while Jeff Genung was on vacation.
The second: While it wasn’t always pretty, a newspaper managed to get published and delivered every day. Not bad for a guy who up until about two years ago didn’t know how to check his own e-mail account and, even now, can barely stay inside the lines when he takes a crack at his two-year-old niece’s Elmo coloring book.
The third: It took all I had, but I didn’t eat a single miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup out of the two-pound squirrel stash in my boss’ desk drawer. There was a lot of looking. A lot. But no touching.
But before I go breaking my arm patting myself on the back, I’d be lying if I didn’t give most of the credit to my co-workers in the newsroom, darkroom and pressroom. They saved my hide on more than one occasion.
However, before I get too down on myself, I’ll also point out that the editor’s seat is hot and often uncomfortable (In this case, my posterior configuration was not compatible with the groove in Jeff’s office chair, which made my butt feel like it was in an iron maiden all day).
There’s a lot to manage at any one time. Besides tracking and assigning news coverage, yelling at reporters and making-up salacious headlines, at The Evening Sun, the editor is also the lay-out artist, copy editor, paginator and public relations director. That’s means there’s a lot of things one person can screw up if they’re not careful. Just sorting through the unholy amount e-mails – hundreds a day – was nearly enough to cripple the entire operation.
“Keeping all those plates spinning is the hardest part,” said Genung. “On top of that, you never know what your day is going to be like. That’s a challenge. But I think it’s also the best part of the job.”
My problem: I’m good for spinning about one plate at a time. For example, say I got the obituaries section perfect, I’d screw up something simple like the date on the front page (hence the Wednesday, April 2 edition, which had “Tuesday, April 2” – I told everyone is was a belated April Fool’s joke). Or if I did a good job laying out the paper – making sure stories were weighted correctly on the page in terms of their news value and that everything looked tight, balanced and visually appealing for the most part – the paper would get sent over to print late. And that’s bad.
“We had to get used to it being a little bit later,” said Tim Ryan, our pressroom manager at Sun Printing on Borden Avenue. “I had a few delivery drivers waiting with their hands in the air asking, ‘What’s going on?’”
I didn’t make life easy for the guys in the darkroom, either. Dave Montague and Mark Miller had put out the fires I’d sent over – a page with too much white space, an off-center box there, a missing picture file or a page that wasn’t in the right format.
“You had your good days and your bad days,” said Miller. “Everybody does.”
Ryan recommended I practice more often – in two years, I’ve put the paper together start to finish roughly 15 times.
“I would say you should do it at least once a week, in some form, throughout the year to stay on top of it,” he said.
“All in all, I thought it went pretty smoothly,” he added, despite some problems. “Together we were able to get it done.”
As far as my boss, he hasn’t noticed anything too glaring upon his return.
“But no matter how hard you try, you will never put out a perfect product,” he acknowledged. “There will always be an area where you could have done a better job.”