the triple threat
Yesterday morning, when my editor got into the newsroom and I informed her that there was nothing all that exciting going on in the valley or in the world, she suggested that I maybe take it relatively easy.
After all, I had written a pair of B1 stories this week, along with two A1 stories, the latter of which was our big story on the lifting of California's same-sex marriage ban... next week... maybe.
So my editor said something along the lines of, "We won't give you any major A1 projects to do today."
But my morning project of resurrecting some of the legal analysis that was cut from Friday's Proposition 8 story for the Web eventually turned into an A1-candidate follow-up story.
Then, in the afternoon we got word that one of photographers was able to get some sweet shots of the Perseid meteor shower Thursday night that could definitely go on the front page of Saturday's paper, and I was asked to rehash my earlier meteor story so we had something to go along with the photo.
I also volunteered to put together a weather story for Saturday's paper, which I expected would go somewhere inside the Valley section — i.e., the B section — or maybe on B1 since we seemed to be light on both staff and stories yesterday.
During the editors' afternoon news meeting, though, I overheard the editor who usually picks out stories for the front page (or at least recaps the collectively-decided choices) rattle off a list of my three stories. I knew the first two were A1 candidates, but I figured the weather story would maybe just be teased from the front page to its actual home in Valley. Or, you know, maybe the editor had been asked, "What the hell was Indy doing today?" instead of "What's going on A1?"
After the meeting, I didn't bother to ask anyone about my suspicion that perhaps all of my stories would end up on the front page. I was more concerned with getting all three of the stories done and filed since I had things to do in the post-work afternoon/evening that I was running late for.
Anyway, fast-forward to this morning, when I checked Today's Front Pages on newseum.org and found that, yes, I did write all three of the front-page stories in today's Desert Sun. Awesome.
*
Now, I know this is a stereotype, but I've found that it's a mostly true one: Gay people know how to party.
Gay bars are generally the best places to shake one's groove thang, and those pride parades (like the '08 one in Cape Town, seen at right) are like a whole bunch of disco dance parties on wheels.
Here in the desert, supporters of gay marriage have often held rallies in Palm Springs to celebrate whenever things have gone their way in the courts. But today's news that same-sex marriage would again be allowed in California... next week... if a higher court doesn't intervene in the meantime... didn't seem to prompt much hootin' and hollerin' around California.
I was on Prop. 8 watch today at work, and I was monitoring our Sacramento TV station's live feed from San Francisco, thinking that I'd hear plenty of cheers, jeers or other such commotion whenever word of decision spread through the crowd outside City Hall.
But I swear, that crowd got more riled up about passing cars that were probably honking or waving at them than they seemed to be once word of the decision started to get around.
Speaking of, the news was broken to us at TDS in a most peculiar way this afternoon. Although I was watching the wires like a hawk and we had the TVs strategically set to the cable networks we thought most likely to put the news on the air first, I first caught word of the ruling in an e-mail from a source I had been talking with. And this was not a high-level gay rights advocate or organizer or anything, just a regular guy who was keeping an eye out for the ruling and heard about it from a local television station in Sacramento. (Sadly, 'twas not the Gannett station there that I sort of had my eye on.)
In any case, even as word rolled in about the (eventual, possible) lifting of the stay on the judge's ruling overturning Proposition 8, there was never much commotion on the SF livestream. By the time cable networks were cutting to that live shot, the crowd looked considerably thinner than it did just before noon as the anticipation was still in the midst of its final upswing.
Not too long after I noticed this and got the sense that no one in our area, from either side of the issue, was getting all that hot and/or bothered about a decision with another waiting period attached, I wrote this lede for my eventual print story:
A federal judge handed supporters of gay marriage another victory — and another asterisk — on Thursday.
And I only ended up tweaking it a little bit before filing the story hours later. To me, that summed up the day. Gay marriage supporters got another piece of good news, but it wasn't quite what they were hoping for. Those pushing for Prop. 8 to stay in effect got some discouraging news, but they've got another shot at reversing the decision. I figure that for people on both sides, the judge's ruling must've seemed like an order to just wait and see.
end of an era
One of my friends and co-workers, Colin, has a pretty notoriously messy desk, which just so happens to be right next to mine. See, Colin used to be my nighttime counterpart in breaking news / cops reporting. But he was one of the many people involved in the newsroom game of musical chairs that went on while I was on vacation. And now that everyone's pretty well situated in her or her new beat, the newsroom game of musical desks has begun.
Now that Colin's a city reporter, he answers to a new editor who works in another part of the newsroom. And his successor in the night reporting gig, my friend and co-worker Kate, has all sorts of needs (like being able to see the newsroom TVs) that could be filled if only she sat in a different place.
A move was inevitable, and rumor had it that it might go down this past Monday. But I walked in on Tuesday and saw Colin's stuff still spread across the desk.
Well, I actually saw the same thing this morning, too. Only this time, his computer was missing.
Even though Colin had joked about resisting the move and lamented his departure from the features desk's sphere of influence as the end of an era, the time had come. I heard from Kate that Colin was getting moved last night... and that was partially true. The rest of the moving happened when Colin came into work this morning and the end of an era came to... an end.
Here are the before and after pictures from this morning:
The irony of it all (for yours truly, at least) is that even though I won't sit right next to Colin at work anymore, I'm actually going to see a lot more of him in general since we a) no longer have shifts that only overlap by about an hour and b) we now both have Mondays off.
Plus, if today was any indication, Colin will be back to visit. At least he had better come back to visit... and to move his refrigerator because Kate's already threatening to sell it in order to get some do$$ars for the purchasing of a Breaking News Pet.
Yes, this is what Fridays at TDS are like. (And yes, shareholders, I did manage to write a few stories amid all this excitement.)
Statistically speaking, yesterday was awesome.
As you probably already know, I was up way past my bedtime on Monday night.
As I probably should've known, that made for a tired and grumpy Brian throughout the day Tuesday.
But even though my facial expressions and grumbling almost certainly didn't show it, I thought yesterday at work was pretty freakin' awesome.
Things were generally quiet enough on the breaking news front that I was able to focus most of the day on doing an analysis of some relative humidity data for a story that was on A1 this morning and working the data into the story.
Even so, I was still able to report (albeit from the newsroom) on the major breaking local story of the day and didn't have to push off everything that would normally fall under my beat to someone else in the office.
(That said, my editor is usually at work behind the scenes when I'm concentrating on a noteworthy non-breaking story, deflecting story ideas, tasks and wild goose chases that would otherwise come my way.)
And at this point, those two are the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular stories on mydesert.com. That's pretty sweet too.