Have you noticed that whatever goes wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment? That’s what happened to us a week ago Friday when, at 10:10 p.m., The Columbian’s fire alarm sounded.
A fire alarm is never a good thing, but this was a great moment in awful timing. That Friday was probably our biggest news day in months. We were wrapping up the cover pages with stories and photos about teachers strikes, memorials for John McCain and Aretha Franklin, and, most urgently, the first night of high school football.
“If you could have picked the worst time of a football Friday for that to happen, this was it,” Sports Editor Micah Rice said later. The 7 p.m. games were in the fourth quarter or just concluded, and our reporters and photographers were in the process of writing five game stories and eight game summaries, and preparing five game photos for print. The desk editors were busy assembling the pages, including the late baseball and college football scores. And the entire team — five people — was updating our prep sports webpage and editing and uploading five game videos to our YouTube channel.
To make it even worse, when the alarm sounded, there was a smoky odor in the newsroom. I was pleased that everyone actually left the building, though there was some temptation to ignore the hullaballoo and keep working. Assistant Sports Editor Tim Martinez grabbed a notebook computer on the way out the door and finished writing his story from his car.
Probably half of the Vancouver Fire Department arrived within minutes, but it took a painfully long time to search every nook and cranny of our large, oddly designed building and determine there was no fire. (They never did identify the source of the odor.)
By the time everyone returned to work and finished the paper, we were 40 minutes late to press, and the last bundle of papers wasn’t out the door until 2:50 a.m. Many newspapers still hit porches on time, though our circulation representatives did receive about 70 more complaints than usual.
That’s not ideal, but I am proud to say we did the best we could.
Focusing on business
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how difficult it is to find and hire the right people to become reporters and editors.
I have some good news to share on that front. We’ve found two great people for our business news team.
Our new business editor starts Monday. He’s Allan Brettman, a veteran journalist whom I’ve know casually for 30 years. I first worked with Allan in the late 1980s at The Daily News in Longview. After a few months, I landed a full-time job in Portland, and Allan later went to work at The Oregonian, where he was in the Clark County bureau for seven years. I briefly worked with him there, too, before coming back to The Columbian and competing against him. After moving to the main office, he covered a little shoe and apparel company called Nike.
Joining him on Sept. 20 is Anthony Macuk. Anthony comes to us from the Lake Oswego Review, where he was a reporter and then assistant editor. If you work on a weekly newspaper like the Review, you cover business news, city government news, breaking news and every other kind of news, generally all at the same time. No wonder he said he wants to explore topics in greater depth, and sharpen his skills at using data to tell stories. He’ll get his chance here.
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