From news to paper

The day begins, as usual, with the crackle and drone of the police scanner, an endless recitation of crimes and miseries that by evening might or might not be a headline.

The Deseret News building was designed to look like a newspaper, with logo at top and windows in columns.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
The scanner is the background music of the newsroom, and if you're a police reporter you learn to listen to it with only one part of your brain while the rest of you is doing something else. You are listening for the words that will make your heart race: fire, fatal, man with a gun. You are listening for the subtle change in pitch of a dispatcher's voice.
It has been, as always, a momentous night along the Wasatch Front. Babies have been born, people have fallen in and out of love, taken ill, recovered, died. None of this is news, though, in the way we've come to mean that word. Newswise, it's been a slow night. The scanner has chirped out a monotonous refrain: stolen cars, false alarms, heart attacks, static.
Still, there's a paper to put out.

6:30 a.m.
It's been 5½ hours since night police reporter Brady Snyder turned off the scanner and went home. Now it's Derek Jensen's turn. He clicks the scanner back on, sits down at his computer and begins making calls to area emergency dispatch centers.
It's quiet in the newsroom and still mostly dark. Only a few lights have been turned on, and under two of them Jon Ringwood and Ron Cook are looking through the national and international wires for stories for the paper's A section. There are hundreds of possibilities. There are also 320 wire photos, including some of politicians, an Oregon girl who needs a double transplant, earthquake damage in Sumatra, a snorkeling pig in Cincinnati and the leaning tower of Pisa, which apparently is getting straighter.

7:30 a.m.
Newspapers operate on two basic premises: (1) something new happens every day and (2) some news is more important than other news.
But which news is it?
There are 10 editors and staff members around a table, in the small conference room just off the newsroom on the seventh floor. Editor John Hughes is out of town, so Managing Editor Rick Hall is in charge. Time to see what we've got for the day.

Editors gather for 4:30 p.m. meeting to plan Saturday paper.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
Hall listens to the editors' reports: a bill to abolish the estate tax, another story about Microsoft, a scandal about missile testing, Putin getting tougher in Chechnya, Steve Young's decision to retire from football. On the local side, Hansen and Cook down in the polls, Murray cops learn sign language, a Highland High student gets a $100,000 scholarship from Rosie O'Donnell, a new study about the proposed Grand Mall.
"Today's best picture is a snorkeling pig in Cincinnati, " says Ringwood. He shows the group a black-and-white computer printout of the photograph. "That's a lime-green snorkel."
OK, says Hall. "We've got the mall, the job performance poll, Brad Rock's column on Steve Young, Toomer's story on the Rosie O'Donnell girl. We've also got missile defense. And lime-green pigs. I don't see a lead jumping out at us."
"TV did (Steve) Young last night," Assistant Managing Editor Wendy Ogata reminds everyone.
"The thing is," says Hall, "people will read every word on Steve Young."
Although it might seem that there is an inherent hierarchy of news value — that some stories are simply more important and deserve space on the front of either the A section or Metro — there is no magic formula. There are, instead, questions. Did the story happen on our deadline or did everyone already see it on TV? Is there good art? Is it the kind of story people gravitate to — about children, pets, diseases, football heroes?
Yesterday the scanner had said "plane in distress." A Delta 727 with hydraulic problems, circling Salt Lake International. Derek Jensen had grabbed a notebook and headed off to a makeshift press center. Someone turned on the newsroom's three TV sets, and a few harrowing minutes later the TVs showed the plane landing safely. In today's paper the incident will get only three column inches at the bottom of metro briefs.
It is a measure of both Utah's increasing worldliness and our collective worldweariness that what used to be big headline news no longer is. Not too many years ago drive-by shootings made the front page but now are relegated to "Police Briefs." Same with car accidents, even fatalities. Several more tornadoes and those might hardly get a mention, either.

Photographer Laura Seitz listens during the 4:30 p.m. planning meeting for the Saturday paper.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
9 a.m.
Lois Collins is trying to clean off her desk. Collins covers both medicine and technology, two fields that employ hyperactive public relations departments. So she spends part of each day sorting through press releases and faxes, not to mention the 50 or a hundred e-mails she gets a day. Like most reporters, she is grateful for the ideas and the news tips, and overwhelmed by the crush of information.
Sometimes it seems that the newspaper might be buried in press releases and faxes and hype. Press releases arrive in satin boxes. Press releases are accompanied by T-shirts and ceramic mugs and posters. And, recently, Collins' least favorite p.r. gambit: a press release about children's car seats . . . that arrived at her desk inside an old, unsafe car seat. Worried that if she threw it away some unsuspecting parent might find it and use it, Collins spent the next hour dismantling the thing.

10 a.m.
Growing up, Angie Hutchinson's dad read both local papers every day, so Hutchinson started reading the paper, too, just so she could spend more time with him. Now she's addicted to the news, she says, and she gets her daily fix as city editor.
Some journalists, on the other hand, are adrenalin junkies. Associate City Editor Matt Brown once tried public relations work but after a few months went stir crazy. In all those months there was only one little crisis, he says. At a newspaper, though, there's the daily rush of breaking news and deadlines — and the daily chance to wipe the slate clean and start all over again.
Some days the adrenalin rushes more than other days. Some days the voice on the police scanner will suddenly be saying "man with a gun at the Family History Library." Some days all you have to do is look out your window and see a tornado touching down.
Education reporter Jennifer Toomer-Cook was out on an assignment when the tornado swept through Salt Lake last summer. It drove her crazy to be stuck in South Salt Lake when the big news was downtown.
Olympic reporter Lisa Riley Roche was luckier. She slept through the tornado, having gone home sick. But she lives in the Avenues, so as soon as she heard the news (from a friend out of state who wondered if she was OK), Roche went back to work and was immediately sent out to the tornado "command post."

Lois Collins, the medical writer, tries to clean off her desk.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
Even on a slow news day you might get lucky, adrenalinwise. Today, Amy Joi Bryson and photographer Scott Winterton have gone for a bumpy ride in a World War II cargo plane, flying in formation over 20,000 Boy Scouts in Tooele. And, even if you're stuck in the office, there are still deadlines. You can sit at your computer terminal and try to concentrate while a room full of other reporters are talking on the phone.
Right now, Jennifer Dobner is on the phone trying to get a scoop, in advance of a news conference Gov. Mike Leavitt has called for 1 p.m. One p.m. is too late for the Friday deadline, so Dobner is trying to find someone, anyone, who knows now what the governor will say.
Pretty soon, though, time will run out. In the newsroom, editors are always impatient, deadlines are ever-present and the clock keeps ticking away.

11 a.m.
Headline writers are masters of the three-letter word. Ban, bid, let, get — if you're a headline writer you learn all the short synonyms that are perfect for a one-column head. You learn to be economical, to find the one word that sums up the paragraphs that follow. "A whiff of nostalgia," Ringwood came up with recently for a story about outhouses. "U. of Phew!" Scott Taylor wrote last year when the University of Utah squeaked by with a last-second WAC tournament win.
Copy editors also are the last, best hope for a reporter's story. It is the copy editors, often, who will save a reporter's hide, on days when spelling and verb agreements have been sacrificed for speed. That doesn't mean the paper doesn't end up with the occasional typo or dangling modifier or worse.
"Your mind fills in," Susan Hermance says, explaining how even the best copy editor can miss something, can completely overlook the fact that the reporter meant wildfire but wrote wildlife instead.

Assistant city editor Mary Finch takes the stairs instead of elevator.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
By 11, today's stories have been edited, and paginators have figured out how to fit them on the page, including the story Jenifer Nii has just called in from the Robert Allen Weitzel trial in Farmington. "Heady Heady Heady," the paginators have typed at the top of the stories that are still awaiting headlines. Or, for the "summary deck" that will be used on longer stories, an instruction such as "sum deck here for Steve Young, please write a sum deck here for Steve Young."

11:30 a.m.
Production Manager John Mitchell has been walking up and down the stairs at the paper all morning, trying to make sure every department is turning its pages in on time. Mitchell has been a newspaperman since the hot-metal days and then the paste-up days. These days, of course, everything is done by computer.
These days, too, there is an online version of the Deseret News, updated as the day goes on by the paper's New Media department. The online version gets thousands of "hits" each day. In the past year, the best-read story on the paper's Web site has been the August 1999 tornado — 44,754 hits and counting.
Today's paper has 52 pages, two editions. Each page is produced separately, first as a negative, then an aluminum plate, and all this takes time. You can't have all 52 pages arriving in the back shop all at once. So Mitchell spends his day checking and nagging and walking and checking again. The Deseret News is housed on seven floors, and the backshop — where the page negatives are turned into press plates — is next door, connected by a long corridor. His first day on the job he made the mistake of wearing dress shoes.
At 11:30, Mitchell walks from the backshop, down the stairs to the presses. The stairs get blacker the closer you get to all that paper and ink. The presses are rolling and whirring now as Mitchell pulls a paper off the stack. That's when he notices the problem on A1. Somehow, "sum deck here for Steve Young, please write a sum deck here for Steve Young" has managed to actually get into the first edition.
"Stop the presses!" Mitchell yells, or something to that effect. You don't get to hear that phrase very often, despite what it might seem like in all the movies made about newspapers. Features editor Chris Hicks remembers that years ago, on the day John Singer was shot, then-editor Bill Smart yelled it. "It was the highlight of my career," says Hicks.

Photographer Scott Winterton takes a picture of a World War II-era plane for a story.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
So the presses are stopped and a new, more appropriate summary deck is hurriedly inserted: "The decision to retire was an agonizing one for the most accurate passer in NFL's history."
Now it's time to think about Saturday.

1 p.m.
Dobner has skipped lunch and has gone instead to cover disability activists who are demonstrating in front of the governor's office.
Now it's time for the governor's news conference at the Department of Human Services. Leavitt is responding to criticism from parents who have adopted children with psychological problems only to find out that state funding for their care has run dry.
It is an emotionally charged news conference. Several parents are reduced to tears. One mother blames the press for "portraying these kids as potential killers."

2 p.m.
The great thing about a newspaper, says Deseret News Editor John Hughes, is that readers browse through it. "If you do it right, you can compel the reader to read what he wouldn't think he would want to read."
If a story is done well, then, it doesn't have to be about tornadoes and plane crashes and homicides. So, like most papers, the Deseret News spends a lot of effort on nonbreaking stories — on features and analyses and editorials, on artful illustrations and pictorial collages and quick-read graphics.
Down on the fifth floor, feature writer Carma Wadley is putting the finishing touches on a story about the night she spent at the Museum of Natural History with 20 Cub Scouts. The feature department is home to the paper's arts and entertainment critics and to travel editor Katie Clayton, who is, at this moment, in Wales.

Workers read over "spoils," the first papers off the press in the press room.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
4 p.m.
It's Friday afternoon, for heaven's sake. Almost time for regular people to go home for the weekend.
But reporter Hans Camporreales has just come back from federal court with a lawsuit that has been filed this afternoon. He hands that one over to education reporter Maria Titze and then sits down to tackle his own late-breaking problem — the stack of papers he discovered on his chair when he got back to the office. They're the latest motion in the ACLU Main Street Plaza case.
Camporreales gets on the phone. So does Titze but has no luck. She returns, instead, to a story she's working on with Jennifer Toomer-Cook, an in-depth look at education expectations of east side vs. west side high school students. Titze has been losing sleep over this story, worrying that her editors will schedule it before she has time to finish her research.
The truth is slippery enough, as every reporter knows. Whose version is the right one? Which facts do you include and which do you leave out?
For the paper's photographers, reality is a little more straightforward, but digital technology means that even a photographer can tweak the truth. That's why the paper has a strict policy about altering photos, says photo editor Tom Smart. Sure it would be easy to remove a distracting telephone pole in the background of a photo. But then where do you stop? How does the reader trust that you haven't changed something else?
Digital technology has also changed the speed of the news. Jeff Allred took a digital camera on a hot-air balloon ride a couple of years ago — and the pictures showed up in the newsroom before the balloon landed.

6 p.m.
The Deseret News is an afternoon paper, except on Saturdays and Sundays. So on Fridays the staff puts out two papers — the Friday afternoon and the Saturday morning. The second shift begins coming around 3, and the process starts all over again. Editors gather at 4:30 p.m. to discuss story possibilities, then reconvene at 6 to make their final selections.
Saturday's paper is, generally, a fairly skinny thing, and this week is worse than usual. There are too many stories and too many photos and not enough space and, again, no compelling breaking news. It is perhaps telling that a story has come over the wire this afternoon about a Web site where you can watch corn grow.
Finally, after some debate, the editors piece together an A1: Joe Bauman's quirky weather story, the House's axing of the estate tax, Roche's scoop on Delta Air Lines sponsoring the Olympic torch relay, Jensen's story about a man once convicted of killing two missionaries in Texas and Dobner's story on the adoption news conference, which probably would have gone on B1 if the art hadn't been so good.

7 p.m.
They're putting her story on A1 and Dobner has writer's block. The news conference had been inconclusive, as well as emotional, the issues were complex and the governor's statement had seemed like little more than a Band-Aid. She knows that one role of the press is to give people a voice who might not otherwise have one. But of course she wants to present both sides. And there is never enough space.
Dobner leans into her computer, thinks, types, deletes, types some more.

10 p.m.
Night police reporter Elyse Hayes is working on a story about a broken water main in Glendale when she hears something on the scanner. A girl has swallowed fingernail polish and paramedics have been dispatched. Hayes doesn't know if the girl is a baby or a teenager, whether the swallowing was accidental or on purpose, whether it's a story or not. She makes some calls and finally finds a dispatcher who knows what happened: it was accidental and the girl is OK. No story there.

10:30 p.m.
Scott Iwasaki rushes in, breathless. His Lou Reed concert review is due in 30 minutes, even though the concert is still going on at Abravanel Hall. Iwasaki, who has 5,000 CDs in his spare bedroom at home, 3,000 of which are alphabetized, figures he listens to music 20 hours a day. Pretty much all the time, unless he's rock-climbing or sleeping, and he happens to have insomnia.
He slips a Lou Reed CD into the computer and begins to type.

11:52 p.m.
Three more baseball scores to get into the sports section. "OK, we're out!" yells paginator Larry Curtis. Seven minutes past deadline but not bad.

12:30 a.m.
"It's like that line in 'Shakespeare in Love,' " says weekend editor Ray Boren. He is standing by the presses, so he has to shout. He is holding Saturday's paper in his hand.
Of course the guy in the movie was talking about the theater business, but it pretty much sums up the journalism business, too, and the business of putting out a daily paper.
"The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster... Strangely enough, it all turns out well."
And then it's time to do it all over again.

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