Ohio is one of those states with lots of cities. I grew up in Akron, which is a respectable size city, but is just one of several in a state of many. There’s Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. And those are only the largest. And they all have a major daily paper, many which aspire to be more than just the local paper of record.

So in a time where state capitol bureau’s are being cut, where getting someone to break the news half a state away isn’t always financially viable and where the locals can probably lend better context to that story anyway… Ohio’s newspapers are taking a step forward.

They’re sharing their stories. Yeah, there’s the AP. But if my reading of the PD’s editor column is right, this goes beyond that.

So the ultimate winner is you because, under this system, you will be able to see the best work written by the best reporters in Ohio’s largest cities in The Plain Dealer or on Cleveland.com. And you’ll be getting it at the same time as the folks in those cities do.

It took a bit of doing because the competitive instinct is in every good journalist’s DNA, and most of us would swallow our notebooks before we’d share what’s in them with another reporter. We’ve spent our professional lives trying to keep other newspapers from getting our good stories. Now, we’re giving them away.

Here’s why:

The way that news from The Plain Dealer and other big papers used to find its way around the state was this: We would report and write our stories, wait until late in the day, and then turn them over to the Associated Press. The AP would then either rewrite them into wire service story format for general consumption; report and write its own stories later; or decide that the news was not of statewide interest and do nothing. If we had a breaking-news story all to ourselves, we would try to keep it away from the wire until the following day. So did everyone else.

That’s not good enough anymore. In fact, I’m not sure it ever was. Competition is a wonderful thing. It keeps everyone sharp. But we don’t compete for readers with the newspapers in Cincinnati or Columbus, except in the most tangential way, and never did.

We almost always break our stories online now as soon as they happen, so they’re not exactly a secret from the other newspapers anyway. So why not give readers all over Ohio the benefit of the best work from each corner of the state?

In today’s world, breaking news is measured in minutes, not days. It’s important that we provide our readers with the best news report we can, as soon as we can, on our Web site and in the best and most current newspaper possible each day.

I’m all for spreading the content and breaking down barriers to good journalism. Kudos to the news orgs for recognizing and addressing that. This is good news for Ohioans.

If you know Indiana, you know we’re usually fly-over territory for presidential candidates.

That’s why, when we heard late Friday that not only was Hillary Clinton’s campaign coming to Indiana, but Lafayette was going to host her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, we became, to quote my editor describing me and another reporter, “Giddy.”

I was in college in Ohio during the last election. So I have seen several presidential hopefuls in person. But tonight was the first time I’ve been in the same room as anyone who ever commanded this country.

Let me say this, the experience was intense. But not because of what he said or the 3,000+ crowd in the gym, another gym and the school auditorium. It was intense because of my assignment.

The only story I wrote for tomorrow’s paper was a look at the preparations the high school underwent and the excitement from the students. That makes sense, since I’m the education reporter and all. I headed to the school at lunch and talked to the principal and some students. I came back and wrote an online version of the story to kind of give a feel during the day of the atmosphere. Then, before 3 p.m., I’d filed that story for print and moved on.

Today was also a big day on my beat, so I worked a little on another MAJOR story on my beat that will go online early tomorrow morning, followed with a more in-depth story for Wednesday print. The Adequate Yearly Progress results — basically, whether a school is failing or not under NCLB — were released with a 10 a.m. Tuesday embargo.

I was also, throughout the day, talking to the campaign, the schools, etc. checking on information we were hearing and answering questions our readers asked. Lining up logistics with my editor, other reporters and photographers.

And then, at 4 p.m., it was time to really tackle my assignment: Updates from the scene throughout the night. That was three hours before doors opened and four hours and 40 minutes before Clinton took the stage.

All told, I sent my editor 18 updates from my laptop at the scene. I know because I counted the number of e-mails when all was said and done, and I could finally breathe.

I had started them with subjects, “Clinton update #1,” “Clinton update #2,” etc. By number 11, I’d lost track. That was also about the time he actually arrived. My subjects became: Clinton arrives, clinton iraq, clinton economy, clinton education, etc.

Some of the updates were detailed narratives, describing the crowd, the atmosphere and talking to people lined up. Some were just a short synopsis of where it stood: Police chief says Clinton left previous stop, expected by 8:30.

I adapted my method in the middle. I wasn’t looking at jconline throughout the event, so I didn’t really know how my editor was playing what I submitted. I was trying to get my next update reported and keep the information fresh. There were a few other reporters in the crowd as the event start approached, and they were also there helping catch some color from the lines and feeding it to me to send in with my updates. By about 7:30, I just started typing them with time stamps and then jumping in with what I was hearing and what was occurring. This, as it turns out, was a pretty efficient way of writing the event backwards, much like a twitter stream.

Actually, at the same time I was writing for and filing updates to jconline, I was also trying to post updates on Twitter. Though, obviously, my priority was on the J&C, which reaches far more people than my Twitter account. Though it was cool, and you kind of see it in my updates, I was even interacting with other people back at the J&C and also across the room from me.

You can look at jconline and see, my updates were fairly regular. As Clinton began to speak — an hour and forty minutes after doors opened and the crowd started streaming in — I started to chunk the topics into five or six graph break downs. I tried to mirror that while the e-mails sent with my snappy posts on twitter. What Clinton said, a little context and any crowd reaction.

It was difficult, as you’ll see I noted in one of the twitter updates, to both be there and not be there. I was present, but I spent a lot of time basically taking diction and then trying to make it digestible, readable updates. While stream of consciousness might work for twitter, it wouldn’t cut it for the J&C. So I was using a skill I’m not sure I’ve ever had a chance to practice: I was both listening to what he was saying in the present and writing a story live about what he had just said while monitoring the discussion for what would come next.

I’m sure my writing wasn’t my best work — for one thing I used the word crowd entirely too often, and most of the speech updates start “Bill Clinton discussed.” But I wrote fast, and I wrote a lot. And give me some slack, I’ve never — in fact I don’t think my news organization has ever — done anything like this.

Twitter aside, my work for J&C was half live blogging and half writing for the newspaper audience online. All my work was funneled through my editor to be posted. So there was about a five-minute delay. But considering how furiously I was filing, I am glad he was there to read over my shoulder and relay any questions or fix obvious mistakes.

As you can see from my Gmail outbox above, a few of my updates, especially early on, included e-mail exchanges with my editor. I talked to him twice, after I sent the first update and once immediately after I sent the last one. None of those updates, by the way, will appear in tomorrow’s newspaper. Some of the reporting may in another reporter’s story, but my entire assignment/direction on this, as taken from the budget, was:

• After school lets out: Are people lining up. Meranda
• At 7: An updates as crowd assembles. Meranda
• Update from the scene as Clinton speaks. Meranda

So there was a lot of figuring it out on the fly. And you know what, like I said, it was intense. But it was awesome! It was even quite a bit of fun.

I don’t know if every event deserves such rapid-fire updates, but this was something that was changing by the minute early on, and which had a great deal of interest in our community. It’s not every day a president drops by small-town Indiana. I’m not sure how many page views we generated today or if that even matters. I’m not sure what part my updates played in any of that, but I hope our readers who were planning to attend, did attend or couldn’t attend benefited from the pretty comprehensive look at the day the former president visited our community.

With that said, it’s now approaching midnight. I worked from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. today coming off a 2 to 10 p.m. shift Sunday. I need to get in around 8 a.m. tomorrow to finish the AYP story for online.

In short, though I’m pumped with all that journalism-is-alive adrenaline from my day, I’m also exhausted. I think it’s time to put the computer away and wind down from probably the most exciting day of journalism career to date.

I wrote about angryjournalists.com a couple times.

Now, here’s something more up my alley: HappyJournalist.com.

I can dig that. (Actually, I even mentioned that someone should create a site to ask the question “Why are you happy today?” in my original Angry Journalists post. I’m just sayin’.) So thanks to Joe Murphy of the Denver Post for fulfilling my wish.

I just posted an item. Not much up yet, but there will be, surely. At least I hope. The more I read aj.com the more depressing I realized it was that so many people hated their jobs and this industry. I mean, we all need to vent, but surely if you hate it that much you should consider switching jobs.

Here’s one big difference between happy and angry journalists: Happy journalists leave names. Obviously, it’s not a forced id system, but so far I’m recognizing many of these people.

Here’s my post:

Meranda 4:58 pm on March 3, 2008 | #
I’m happy today because my package on A1 tomorrow is among my favorite I’ve written in the last year. It was fun to report, too, and an interesting topic. Plus, there’s a photo page and soundslides online. So it should be a fun story for the readers, too. Gotta love that.

The story, by the way, is about the Hoosier Youth ChalleNGe Academy. I spent last Thursday down there (it’s a National Guard run “quasi-military” school to help at-risk teens — basically those who’ve dropped out of school) with a photographer kind of shadowing some local kids being touched by it. Plus, I did a sidebar about a local cadet who graduated in the inaugural class. (The academies are in about half the U.S. states, but the one in Indiana just opened in summer 2007.)

I don’t know if it was being away from the office, being in a brand new very different setting or just that I know beyond a doubt we’ve never written this story before, but for whatever reason I really enjoyed it. It made me happy. And the story is something I’m actually proud of and will most definitely add to my clips.

(P.S. When the story is posted Tuesday, I’ll come back and update with a link.)

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the main story about the academy, the sider about the recent graduate returning, and the soundslides the photographer put together.

So, why are you happy today?

The Monte Carlo Casino on the Las Vegas strip is on fire. For that news, the Las Vegas Sun has got you covered.

and an update

Here in Indiana, thousands of miles away, I might have caught this news blip on tonight’s news. (Except I only watch when I’m at work, and I’m off today.) If I was a 24-hour-TV-news junkie, which I used to be and am still recovering from, I may have caught it on CNN. (But my TV’s in my living room down the hall collecting dust. No, really, it’s been about a month since I turned it on.)

I learned, instead, via Twitter. It was also the way I heard about the recent market turmoil and the death of Heath Ledger.

I know I’ve been writing a lot about Twitter of late. But that’s because it’s become increasingly part of my daily routine. Where once Facebook was a dominant force for keeping in touch and updated, these days I find myself updating and reading Twitter instead. (To be fair, my Twitter status is fed to Facebook.) And I find it far more useful and helpful for me.

On a related side note, I love the Las Vegas Sun’s approach to the story. They’re updating the blog with new info. But I like the approach on the front of the site. It’s bullet by bullet what you want to know. No B.S. no he said, she said. Just what is going on, what has already happened, who is affected, and where to get more information. Nice and concise.

The Akron Beacon Journal has launched a new blog/politics site to cover the 2008 campaign in the swing state that decided the ‘04 election. But it’s not just presidents, it’s local issues and candidates and more.

(The big white space is an ad that’s blocked on my computer, not a flaw in their design.)

From their announcement story:

Today, Ohio.com will launch politics.ohio.com, a new site dedicated to getting the scoop on the issues that affect the average voter. It will scour other newspapers’ Web sites and provide links to stories to help voters make informed decisions on topics and candidates.

But it won’t stop there. Political junkies also will find the details they crave such as links to Ohio government sites, including the governor’s office, the House and Senate and the Ohio Supreme Court. Voters will be able to find links to election sites at all of Ohio’s 88 counties, as well as the Ohio Secretary of State’s office and links to each presidential candidate’s official Web site.

Take a look: politics.ohio.com.

Did anyone else catch that Twitter went mainstream today? Kind of.

Though I’m still defending myself from the Twitter jabs my peers pour on — even the most tech-savvy of them doesn’t “get it” — The New York Times, thankfully, does.

The NYTs’ fourth most e-mailed technology story of the moment is this gem, Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps.

It’s a look at several political reporters micro-blogging the presidential campaigns through Twitter and the like. Nothing particularly enlightening, though a few comic anecdotes.

As Mr. Knox makes clear, news has always come in different sizes. Despite the new gadgetry, these journalists are actually rediscovering telegraphese — the clipped (ideally witty) style that flourished because of word limits imposed by an earlier technology, the telegraph. Today, it is the limits imposed by text-messaging.

“It’s a sign of just how impatient this generation is,” Ms. Cox said. “I don’t have to open up a computer, and it’s no more than 140 characters.” …

To Josh Tyrangiel, the managing editor of Time.com, “the business thinking is the same as almost all of my business thinking: Why not?” The more exposure to Time.com’s material, the better, and no one can afford to be choosy about the setting. So Ms. Cox also has a Flickr feed for her photographs from the campaign trail that Mr. Tyrangiel is happy to promote. Ultimately, he said, it is a hopeless fight.

“If you tell people how to consume their content, they will ignore you,” he said, a truism that experience had taught new-media executives. “Let people do what they want to do and try to be in their circle of choice.”

Why it matters though is, and I have no idea where this ran in print or if it did, this will get Twitter before a mass audience of people who may not even be as tech-savvy as my peers who tell me “Twitter just sounds like a dirty word” or joke when I ask if they read an interesting story about whether I saw it on Twitter.

I just laugh. Roll my eyes. Give them a plea to try it out. And then succumb to the inevitable “Dear blogger” jokes that aren’t far behind it. But they mean well, and one day they’ll get it, too. I’m not giving up on trying to win them over just yet.

BTW: You can follow me on Twitter here. My updates are protected, but I’ll add you. (Since it’s mostly personal observations, I want to know who’s reading.) They’re also fed to my Facebook status, where you can also add me by searching my name.

I meant to note this before, when we got the news a few weeks back, but I got caught up in other things and well now there’s a convenient column from the publisher summing up the highlights of the report card the J&C received.

Overall? It’s hella good news for any newspaper (and its subsidiaries, which is probably the wrong word) to be growing readership these days. Here’s what he says:

Publishers, editors, online directors and all of our employees receive another report card every few years.

That report card is the results of independent market research on readership of the print Journal & Courier, jconline and reader answers to questions about their satisfaction with our news coverage.

…

So, I figured losing a few percentage points in print market reach would be a major victory in a time when many newspapers are losing much more ground than that. Maybe, just maybe, we could come close to making up those print losses with our surging Internet site — jconline.

…

So we were stunned when we got our report card.

Readership of the newspaper each day was up slightly from our last research in 2005. Seven-day readership of our newspaper (the percent of the market reading our paper at least once each week) was up slightly to 75 percent.

On top of that, our reach of the local market though jconline each week had grown to an impressive 31 percent.

I expected growth in this area, but not to that extent. In fact, the market reach of jconline is No. 1 in the entire Gannett Company (owners of the Journal & Courier). Total combined print and online reach had increased to 82 percent each week.

The researchers told us that reader satisfaction with our coverage of local news and other topics is high, well above most newspapers our size.

They also told us that readers’ reaction to the new newspaper was overwhelmingly favorable.

There’s more. Even more than he wrote in the column. But even without anything else, that’s impressive and happy news. As one of my profs noted when I was home this weekend about the fact that they bought a new press: “It’s a good sign that they’re investing money in your paper.”

And as I told another friend when I forwarded her a job opening here. Those numbers don’t just mean we’re doing a good job reaching our audience, which is true apparently. They also mean something else vital: job security. (OK, I know no job is “secure,” but I’d rather be at a paper that’s growing and making progress than, well, anywhere else.)

I noticed a weird headline among the IndyStar’s top read stories tonight: “Note to Sunday Newspaper Readers”

It said:

Due to massive computer problems, several news stories planned for Sunday’s newspaper did not appear this morning. The problems, related to computer storage issues, required us to reprint some stories from Saturday’s newspaper, and leave out stories we had planned to publish.

We apologize for the problems which we believe are now fixed. Local news and sports stories we had planned for Sunday’s paper will be published in Monday’s Star.

I guess there’s always that risk, right? The problem with computers is that they crash sometimes. But the paper always comes out right? Right. At least the ads did in this case. I guess that says a lot. Not necessarily good things, either. They can’t get the news out, but the ads can be delivered to your front door step packaged in yesterday’s news. Oy vey.

It just strikes me as supremely odd that they would opt to reprint stories that already ran. How does that make any sense? If anything, just run wire. Or take some of the stories slated to run in the other papers in the chain (there are several in Indiana, including the one where I work). Or reverse publish some of your blogs. Or shift around some of that advertising and tighten the paper to make it seem less empty.

I remember how much we used to curse and cry and freak out when the system would eat our stories on deadline at the Stater, and before we replaced the printer, when we couldn’t get the proofs to print and had to rely on our eyes looking over the screen. And when the PDFs wouldn’t FTP to the printer and we were already past deadline? Oh those nights were a blast, too. For all the ease technology has allowed, it hasn’t been without its own problems.

I don’t pretend to be as smart or experienced as the folks at the Star. But I’m just baffled — as too, apparently, are the readers — as to why you’d re-run yesterday’s content?

To their credit, it does appear some of those stories are online today. But there’s the rub. Tomorrow’s paper will be full of yesterday’s news, again. The news that should have run but didn’t will run a day past its prime. Not as bad as a complete reprint, but an odd conundrum to be sure. I’ve never heard of anything like this, though certainly it can’t be unprecedented?

On the other hand, though this isn’t a correction, I think I may forward it on to Regret the Error because it’s just so odd.

UPDATE:

Editor & Publisher wrote about the glitch in a piece I just stumbled upon. I do feel bad for the Star. I mean, yikes, you can’t access your content? What do you do?

The glitch resulted in numerous pages worth of news and advertising planned for the Sunday paper being left out and replaced by other content, said Managing Editor Pam Fine. She said the problem occurred after the paper’s CCI Publishing System went down and content placed in it was not accessible.

“We wound up running a lot of wire we would ordinarily not run,” Fine told E&P, citing as an example a Page One wire story on the Blackwater security firm and a Web story about a local congressional caucus that ran inside. “We also had a place holder for an enterprise piece that will now run on Tuesday.”

A few weeks ago, maybe not even, we received one of those random calls you often get in a newsroom. The long-shot “this happened, and I think it could make a story” type of tip. But it was from a woman in Texas. And it was just crazy enough but also “feel good” that we pursued it.

You can read my complete story or find the AP version of my story pretty much anywhere by Googling the woman’s name (or on CNN.com to make it easy for you).

Basically, the woman took off her rings to make homemade fudge for a company bake sale. Forgot about the rings until several days later, when she discovered her mother’s diamond ring was missing. After searching every where, even emptying the garbage, she tracked down the name and e-mail of the woman who’d purchased the fudge thinking it a long shot. The buyer, meanwhile, had given the fudge to her sister-in-law’s father in another city. He had discovered the diamond ring during a midnight snack. The woman who bought the fudge got the ring from him, noticed the similarity to her own mother’s diamond ring and set out on a quest to find its owner as well. Though the two worked in the same office, they were in different departments and merely knew of each other before. They exchanged e-mails and the woman got her mom’s diamond back.

So, that’s a funny and heartwarming story, right? Yet, when I was finally able to track down e-mail addresses and phone numbers for the women — not as easy as it sounds — and they called me back they were like, “I don’t really see why this would be a story.” And I explained to them that, well, people just don’t do that. Not everyone finds a diamond and then goes hunting for its owner. At first reluctant, they gave me the interview but declined a photo.

My story ran on our front page and, as I noted above, the wires picked it up (tightening and rewriting a bit, but using my reporting and quotes, etc.). It spread to pretty much … everywhere. (Which hey is cool by me!)

My ME flagged something for me today on our opinion page. The woman who lost the ring wrote a letter to the editor praising us for the story (which led to several TV appearances and the articles spreading around the world). That made me feel good. As she notes, she now realizes why it’s important to tell these feel good stories. Here’s her letter:

Public eager to hear positive news stories

When Meranda Watling contacted me about how I lost my ring in a batch of fudge, I thought she was making a mistake (Journal and Courier, Dec. 29). Who would care?

Was I wrong.

After the story ran here, we saw the article online all over the world: China, Australia and Germany. I have done interviews for WLFI and Fox & Friends so I could publicly thank Linda Rhoades and Red Matson for their kindness, and have now been contacted by a national talk show.

This tells me people want to be told that good things still happen in this world. We hear so much negative news that we forget we are surrounded by wonderful people every day.

I just wanted you to know how right Meranda was in choosing to write a positive, up-lifting article. All the attention has reaffirmed to me just how starved we are for positive news.

We need to be reminded that most people are honest and willing to be good to one another. How many acts of kindness occur daily that we do not hear about?

I am so very grateful to have my mom’s ring back. To me, it is my own personal miracle. I feel very humbled and blessed by this whole experience.

I know this story brought joy to many people, for I have been inundated with e-mails and phone calls. So, please, keep up the good work by including other positive stories in your paper on a regular basis.

Linda Vancel
West Lafayette

I am constantly reminding people who complain that we’re always slamming this or writing about the negative that most of what I write is positive (or at the least and most often, neutral). For every story you hear about low graduation rates or a failing school, I probably write three times as many “this great new opportunity is being offered to students,” or “third-graders at City Elementary School are learning about engineering as part of a grant the teacher received …” you get the idea. But, yeah, people remember the negative. Which makes it all the more imperative that we do strive to balance it with these stories that just remind you there are good people in the world and in our communities.

It seems as if every time the clouds around here even think they might let moisture escape, the rivers flood. I swear, it seems as if Lafayette is in at perpetual flood-stage, though usually not significant. (For those not familiar with the topography of this area, basically the West Lafayette levee area and um, downtown Lafayette, are built down in the valley right on the Wabash River.)

But this was different. Not here, but in parts of our northern coverage area, on the Tippecanoe River that feeds into the Wabash, the river was flowing so high and so fast that it was about as close as possible without going over the 100-year flood level. (That means, for those keeping score at home, the likelihood of such a flood happening in a year is about 1 percent. That is, it might happen once in 100 years.)

I should have taken it as an omen when I woke up at 6 a.m. to howling wind, rumbles of thunder and glints of lightning. I never wake up in the middle of the night. I know 6 a.m. isn’t night. But when you go to bed at 2 a.m. or later and set your alarm for 8 a.m., that’s the middle of the sleep cycle. I remember thinking at that point even how weird it was I was woken up by the weather. Little did I know, I wasn’t the only one. I went back to bed.

When my alarm went off for real. I hit snooze, and then reluctantly got out of bed at 8:15 a.m. thinking I would have plenty of time to shower, eat breakfast and iron the outfit I picked.

Not even five minutes after I crawled out of bed my phone rang again. I thought I must have hit snooze or set a second alarm on accident. Then I saw it come up from the paper. My immediate reaction — which is horrible but true — was “Oh, crap. I got something wrong in my story.” I had written the lead story on front for Tuesday after chasing down details and documents and squirreling some information, reluctantly, out of officials. Though I thought it solid, there was always that chance as a pit in my stomach, “What if I got it wrong?” Well, I didn’t. (Though I did get a call from a less than pleased official re: that story.)

The call was actually my editor. His plea, which he was sending out to every reporter at that moment, was I needed to get in ASAP. We had major flooding and need to mobilize. I told him I could be there in 15 minutes. He told me to wear boots.

So, without a shower and throwing on jeans and a sweater under my coat, I headed out into the drizzle.

I didn’t even have my coat off before I had orders and assignments. (I was among the first reporters to get there since I live closest.) Over the first hour and a half, I called the National Weather Service and the emergency management agency directors in three counties and the power company that owns the dams and I don’t even remember who else trying to find out where everybody was working from, where the flooding was at, how much flooding, what else was coming and more. As reporters came in, they were dispatched, some with photogs and others with point & shoots, to the places we were hearing were worst affected. Meanwhile, I was being handed releases as my editor got them and hearing things on the scanner to check into.

I wrote three Web updates before I even got in my car to head out to the flooded lands. Before I left, we probably had a dozen updates, easy. All told, I don’t know, we had at least 30 related updates today. Plus photo galleries and call-outs for stories and pictures.

As I was driving toward the staging area in a nearby county to find some personal stories and see with my own eyes how bad it was near the dam, I heard the radio come on with “the latest information we’ve gathered.” Only, they didn’t say where they gathered it from. It had been our Web site. I would have been suspicious anyway, because it was information I got from one of the emergency directors as he was leaving a meeting and fueling his truck, not something he sent out in a release. But when they read, verbatim, the quote he said to me (and it was pretty distinctive, which was why I used it), I had to laugh out loud. But I figured, whatever, I’d rather people be aware. Still funny though.

So I drove along the river and through a few water-filled/covered roads (that my mom would not like to hear about and my editor pretended not to approve of either, though they were between me and the story). I spent about an hour and a half talking to people coming off rescue boats or standing on their property watching as the water level rose and came literally to their door. As shocked as these people were, for me, it was my first time ever seeing this type of disaster in person.

Floods are one of those things you hear about elsewhere. And even here, as much as we hear about roads closed due to flooding or the river at flood stage or even as high as I see the water creep into the tree line, this was different. I mean, I was standing on a bridge with water crashing into it and a boat tethered to it. I was told there was a boat dock below that bridge off to one side. But you couldn’t have gotten a toy sail boat between the river and the bridge when I was there. And in the distance, I could see the dam just gushing and gushing. On the other side of the bridge, downstream, I could see homes submerged as far as my eyes allowed me along both sides of the river. It was a site for me to take in as much as it was for anyone else. I had to force myself to pause and breathe and acknowledge the “Wow” factor even before I started flagging down people getting off the boats.

I don’t know who said it, but someone once described a journalist as someone who runs toward what everyone else is running from. It might be stupid or dangerous, even. But I won’t deny it is fun to be right there, to see it in person not just on the news or in the papers. But more than any of those things, it’s important. For the stranded families who needed to evacuate or know when to evacuate and to where, and for the drivers looking to avoid getting swept away, and for the family members near and far who wanted to make sure their loved ones were OK, the information we could only get by being there was worth it.

As rumors swirled — would the dams hold? — and unexpected problems occurred — a fire in a home where the fire department had to be “shipped” in? — a voice of calm and reason was needed. That’s kind of what I saw our role as being. We didn’t need to sensationalize the flood of the century. We just needed to get the facts out, as quick as possible, to as many people as possible. And we did. So I’m heading to bed now, wiped out, but proud of our work today. And hoping tomorrow doesn’t bring the flood downstream.

More: jconline is “flooded” with flood-related coverage now and will be for awhile. Also, take a look at the editor’s take on covering the flood in her blog.