A Week in the Life...

By Henry Dubroff
August 13, 2008

For reporters and editors alike, working at a weekly business journal offers regular hours and a steady rhythm for producing a comprehensive news report.

There are none of the long Fridays that are the hallmark of harried staff trying to produce Saturday, Sunday and Monday sections in a single shift. And a weekly business journal offers the kind of news hold that most Sunday business section editors could only dream about—yes, even stock tables are included.

But the typical Wednesday evening press time at most business weeklies means that the week is chopped in half, with the weekend break squarely in the middle. And a lot of breaking news, by necessity, moves over the Internet.

At the Pacific Coast Business Times the week begins on Thursday, when we sweep out the mental wreckage of production from the evening before.

Because most business journals are delivered by the Postal Service on Friday, Thursday is known as a “dead day.” We expect that our enterprise stories will hold for 24 hours and if news breaks in the dead zone, we go to the Web.

Thursday is terrific for field reporting, source development, enterprise or feature story writing.

For editors, Thursday, alas, is a great day for meetings. At our company, we have a standing Thursday circ meeting, and at the much larger Denver Business Journal, where I was editor from 1995 until 1999, we had a weekly department head meeting on Thursday afternoon. As the owner of the Business Times, I meet with the bookkeeper on Thursdays to get a grip on cash, and I check in with the publisher on how the revenue picture is shaping up.

For mid-level editors, Thursday is the day when the next week’s main news section is dummied and newsmaker columns or other standing features can go on the page. We use Adobe In-Design for production on our Macs.

At our newsroom in Santa Barbara we try to get a little bit ahead of the next week’s newspaper by having a 30-minute news meeting late on Wednesday afternoon. That’s partly because there is a two-hour window while the ad department places ads before the paper can be “finaled” and sent via FTP to our printer.

The news meeting is the time for reporters to pitch stories, to figure out where stories will be placed, to get a jump on photo or graphics assignments. We then have a good idea of what stories will go on our four weekly display fronts—Page One, Page 3, Small Business (or Technology) and Personal Finance.

Friday is a transition day, where the news team basically has to toggle back and forth between reporting and writing.  We like to have our staff-written feature columns in hand or at least started on Friday.  We also start laying out features for our small business section and monthly technology package.

Friday, hopefully, is also the day that advertising generates a dummy on one of our numerous special reports so that production can begin in the newsroom.

Then, on Friday afternoon, everybody pauses for a breath.

Monday and Tuesday are heavy duty writing days when things come together, either smoothly or with the gnashing of teeth. To facilitate communications in the newsroom, we usually have a “blitz” meeting, a brief review of stories and art assignments late Monday morning.

A lot of news happens on Monday morning so our story lineup is prone to getting tweaked fairly heavily. The managing editor is at work building the newspaper essentially from the center out—starting with the small business features and editorial page and the working out to Page 3, Page 1 and the jumps. We put our locally-generated stock index together after the market closes on Monday.

I still write some editorials and a weekly column, which usually happens after 5 p.m. on Monday. I try to give a first read to any stories we think might be potentially libelous and try to give our attorneys a heads up so they can do a review on Monday.

Tuesday is clearly more in the writing mode for the reporters. By this time, we are focused on our page 1 and page 3 offerings and the art for jump pages.

Tuesday afternoon we start to move into what I would call “controlled chaos.”

That continues into Wednesday mid-afternoon when we have generated two sets of proofs, our part-time proofreader has looked over both of them along with the staff and I’ve looked over the headlines and at least scanned a full set of proofs.

Finally, we hand the newspaper off to the advertising/production folks, head into a news meeting and start all over again.

Please enter your friend's e-mail address

Please enter your e-mail address

If you would like to include a message, please add it here:

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism