Business News Hits Peak on Thursday

By Charles Crumpley
November 12, 2004 09:28 AM

If Monday can be stressful because there's so little going on, Thursday can be toilsome because it is the opposite.

For whatever reason, the flow of business news seems to start slow early in the week (as I wrote earlier). It builds through the week and often hits a peak on Thursday or Friday. And for the Times-Picayune, as for many newspapers, Thursday is the deadline for moving Sunday stories to the copy desk. So Thursday is not only a busy news day, it's double deadline day, too.

I try to keep my calendar clear on Thursday. This is no day for two-hour interviews or lingering lunches.

The morning started fast. Keith Darcé discovered a nun had settled a discrimination lawsuit and she is due to get at least $1 million. Trouble is, because she's a nun she has to share the money with her order. That story was destined for Page 1 early in the day, so it didn't disrupt our plans for the Money section.

In addition, Ronette King wrote a story about another lawsuit between cousins of the Brennan family. Various factions of the family own perhaps half or more of the best-known restaurants in New Orleans, and they've been feuding for years over who gets to use the name on their restaurants. We put that story on the rail, or the side of the page.

Our centerpiece, by Mary Judice, was about the high cost of tomatoes, thanks to Florida's hurricanes. We also got a contribution from the State desk. Robert Scott, our Baton Rouge bureau chief (and my predecessor as Money editor), wrote about how a state labor group allowed its domain name to lapse and its Web site got hijacked. We played that across the top because the story had much wider implications.

Here's another thing about Thursdays: Space is often scant, and it certainly was this week. Since we didn't have room for stories inside, and since we felt we should run two of the day's top wire stories on our cover (about Blockbuster's bid to buy Hollywood Entertainment and about Coca-Cola's sudden woes), we had to hold a local story.

Kim Quillen, the assistant business editor, edited Greg Thomas' Sunday story, which is about the sudden condo-mania taking place in the city. We still need to produce a consumer-oriented sidebar about how buying a condo is different from buying a house; Greg was too busy chasing a good news tip to get much traction on the sidebar.

So, the Money section staff contributed a Page 1 story, produced (with the help of the State desk) some good local stories for the Money section front, and moved a Sunday story. We broke deadline on the sidebar, but all in all, it was good for a toilsome Thursday. 

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