There is an old saying that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. I think we probably need to add a third one to that list.
Change.
After all, it is inevitable.
Some are big and some are small. Some are good and some are bad, but no matter how hard we might try to fight it, change is going to happen.
Publisher Trevor Sherman, reporter Leeann Fragosa and myself spent some time talking about upcoming change at the News Journal this past week.
Fortunately, it is nothing too major.
For instance, we have been discussing getting new computers office-wide for the first time in several years. I have had my current one since about 2020, and former Publisher Trent Knuckles had it for a few years before I got it. Macs last a lot longer than PCs. Plus, we are pretty frugal around here.
I spent a good chunk of Friday deleting things off my current computer so that the information can be more easily transferred to a new machine. They tell me that I have too much stuff on my computer. To some extent, they are probably right, but, as soon as you get rid of something, it often ends up being the very thing that you need. (That is my story, and I am sticking to it…LOL.)
We also have a new News Journal website in the works, but I am sure that Trevor will share more about that in the coming weeks as we get ready to bring it online.
While getting the new computers and a new website will be nice, there are always the inevitable little kinks that must be worked out when you have something new.
I got to thinking about the change that the upcoming year will bring after spending much of the rest of my day Friday working on our upcoming year in review story.
Leeann, who has been with us for a few months, asked me what that was Friday, so I figured it might be a good time to explain it for others that also don’t know.
Usually around News Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, most news outlets will do a story reflecting on the top stories of the past year.
Reflecting on the prior year is always something good to do, but one of the real reasons we do this then is that typically there isn’t a lot happening the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The year in review makes for some good material to fill a newspaper or television news cast with during that time period…LOL.
Doing the year in review takes a lot more time than most people would probably realize though.
The process that I came up with a few decades ago is that I sit down with two legal pads.
On the first pad, I list stories that I think might make the top 10 stories of the year list. There are usually a few big ones that come to mind right away.
Then I start looking back at the newspapers from each week of the year starting with the first edition of January and jotting down top headlines on the second legal pad as I go. Inevitably, I will run across stories that I forgot about happening and I add other possible entries to the top 10 story list on the first notebook.
When I get done, I will put together a tentative list of the top two dozen or so stories from the year with a tentative ranking and our editorial staff composed of myself, Trevor and Leeann will go through the list and move around a few things on the list until we come up with the final top 10 stories of the year.
Then, we go through and summarize each item in the top 10 and combine those summaries into a story that will run in the Dec. 31 edition.
This is not exceptionally hard to do, but all of this takes a lot more time than most people might realize.
Also, I will take my list of top headlines from the year from the second notebook and write a column outlining some of the bigger or more interesting stories of the year that didn’t make our top 10. There are always several.
