Month: July 2018

04Jul

Holiday? A daily newspaper doesn’t take a day off

Published July 4, 2018

My attention is more drawn to the clock above my laptop than to the keyboard right now, because I have to leave for work in two hours. (Well, I suppose I hadn’t written my final deadline piece after all.)

The reason I have to work is that it’s Wednesday, and I work at a daily newspaper. We publish every day. That means we publish a paper on the 4th of July, and we publish one on the 5th of July. Which means we work on the 4th of July. Yes, we work today.

In more than three decades in the newspaper business, I’ve worked far more holidays than not, easily at least 75 percent of them. It’s what we do. Family members long ago knew the likely answer when they’d ask, “Do you have to work Thanksgiving?”

Working swing shift adds to the complications in trying to manage a social life. (I work Tuesdays through Saturdays, further complicating things. Before that, Sundays through Thursdays. Before that, Mondays through Fridays for basically the first time in my life. For about four years before that, I worked Thursdays through Mondays.)

Today? Today is Wednesday. It’s my Tuesday. It’s also Independence Day, but it largely feels like any other work day for a career newspaperwoman. Coffee around 3 p.m. will help, and by the time we give the pages one last look even as the presses are running, it will nearly be Thursday. One thing that will make tonight different is seeing and hearing fireworks on the way home around midnight.

A glance at social media shows a spectrum of reactions to this second Independence Day of this administration. So many of them speak to me, albeit in different ways.

 

Nothing like a misspelling to remind you that you’re a copy editor who is due at work in less than an hour now. Time to wrap this up!

Anyway, I’m not complaining about having to work on holidays. I don’t know anything else, so this feels normal. (The closest I’ve come to being mad about it was when I worked in sports and had to leave early from Christmas at Mom’s — as it turned out, I would get only one more before she died — because Nick Saban decided to leave LSU for the Miami Dolphins.)

This rushed post is not the place for me to try to persuade anyone of the importance of journalism in general and newspapers specifically. If they need persuading, there’s probably nothing I can say that will change their mind. They’d probably have to live through the kinds of calamities that can occur when there aren’t enough watchdogs on those in power, and the past couple of years have told me that their chance is coming, probably sooner than I think.

And it’s not as if I am, or ever will be, Sydney Schanberg covering the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, or Nellie Bly doing undercover investigative reporting. The only thing I’m likely to save the world from tonight is a misplaced modifier or dangling participle, or perhaps the two unnecessary words in “in order to.”

Still, whatever I’ve done or will do in what’s left of my newspaper career, including award-winning investigative coverage while working in sports, I will always be proud to have a small place in the larger family and mission of journalism. I can’t think of a time in my life when it’s been more important or endangered. Working holidays is a small price to pay to make sure there’s a paper the next day.

Holiday? Today is Wednesday. My Tuesday. I have to go to work now. It’s also Independence Day, and I take pride in knowing that I’ve given much of my life to a profession that, on a fundamental level, exists to try to ensure that everything we celebrate today will be here tomorrow and every subsequent day ending in the letter “y.” Those just happen to be all of the days that we work.

Happy Fourth of July.

 

Photo by Polarpx/via Shutterstock