Pre-planned Stories and Other Desks Pitch in for Tuesday's Section

By Charles Crumpley
November 9, 2004 08:43 AM

Monday can be a stressful day. The business world's rhythm seems the slowest on Monday, both locally and nationally. You can't depend on a surge of news to bail you out. And for whatever reason, our Tuesday paper often is the most ample, other than Sunday.

The solution seems simple. You sandbag a centerpiece and -- if you're really lucky -- a news story from the week before. Trouble is, it's not simple to pull that off.

Lucky for us, we had managed to do that this week. We had a nice centerpiece from the week before by Jaquetta White. The story is about how Starbucks has, in the opinion of some, kind of underperformed in New Orleans, because of an established roster of local coffee shops.

Actually, it's tough for many national chains to do well in New Orleans because of strong local tastes. True story: Krispy Kremes set up shop in the French Quarter, wisely locating it on one of the busiest streets. Unwisely, Krispy Kremes put it a block from the famed Cafe du Monde. It was the beignet vs. the hot glazed doughnut. A year and a half later, that Krispy Kremes turned off its fryers and locked its doors for good.

We even had a news story sandbagged from the week before. Matt Scallan, a non-business reporter in the bureau whose territory includes the airport, contributed a story about how the airport is thinking about building a second, separate terminal. Matt and the graphics department worked up a map and we had a solid lead story. It's good to have help from other desks.

It's a good thing we had those stories. George Bush had better luck getting votes out of Massachusetts than we had getting news out of companies on Monday. You don't want to have to do an afternoon scramble to come up with something -- anything -- local to put in the paper.

Anyway, we had to round out our cover from the wires. On the rail, we ran a story about how Microsoft Corp. paid $536 million to rival Novell Inc. to clear up an old misunderstanding. And as a bottom-page feature, we ran an interesting AP account about Yasser Arafat's vast but murky financial empire.

Finally, our designer, Robert Landry, made a good editorial contribution. In our late-day news meeting, the other editors (Kim Quillen and Stephanie Naylor, who works Mondays and Fridays in our section) and I had decided to run a bottom-page wire feature about weird soft drinks, ones that taste like turkey and mashed potatoes and the like.

A few minutes later, Robert pointed out that we'd have two stories about drinks -- coffee and soft drinks -- on our cover. We switched to the Arafat story and saved the soft drink story for later, if we need it.

Like I said, it's good to have help from other desks.

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