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Archive for October 1st, 2007

Newspapers have to be that hard-core

Monday, October 1st, 2007

It’s a quarter to 2 a.m., and I’m still awake. I don’t have a good excuse except spending too much time on Yahoo! Answers and the New York Times and losing track of time.

A good friend of mine also is up at this hour. But he has a damn good reason, and as I just finished telling him over Gmail Chat, he’s hard-core.

The state of Michigan is on the verge of a shut-down, with 35K state employees waiting to hear whether they will report to work today. The legislature is pulling an all-nighter — and so are the reporters. Check out LSJ for updates and the Free Press has them, too. So does the Detroit News. (I’m not linking to specific stories because they’re updating and I don’t want to end up w/broken links.) There may be others, but that exhausts my knowledge of Michigan media outlets.

Ryan, who just started as a mojo about two weeks ago at the Lansing State Journal, was one of the lucky ones tapped to report on the events unfolding in the capital city tonight.

At first I thought it was crazy because there’d be no one up reading the stories anyway. But I stand corrected. There are several post-midnight comments posted on the stories. I guess it makes sense: If I was a government employee unsure if I’d even need to get up in the morning, I’d be hanging out for any word of progress, too.

That my friends is why this is not only hard-core but a perfect example of the mindset we need to take. This is information people need and want to know. They don’t want to know in tomorrow’s paper (which was put to bed hours ago, before the midnight deadline passed) or even on the morning newscast. They want to know asap. They want to know now. This is the 24-hour newsroom people talk about. So maybe it’s not hard-core, maybe it’s the new necessary.