Typical Day

Typical Day

Ah, the Statehouse. Ron A. Deadline has been working this beat for ten years and even now, after all this time, his heart beats harder every time he walks through the north entrance doors and flashes his badge at the state troopers on patrol; however, his high blood pressure could also be responsible for the pain in his chest. Hard to say.

He rides the elevator up to the cramped office on the third floor he shares with three other reporters. Ron calls it an office; it's really a glorified closet. He's the first one in, as usual, although he expects his colleagues on assignment from the state's other big papers to be in shortly. He boots up his laptop, drinks some coffee, and looks at the State Assembly's schedule for the day.

Ron is the Statehouse reporter for the state's largest newspaper. He covers the news from the State Assembly when the House and the Senate are in for the session, from January through May. He's also responsible for handling other state political news as assigned to him by the newspaper's political director, Bob "Blue" Redd.

Back in the old days, when Ron had just graduated from college, the stories he wrote appeared in print; his readers had to flip through the pages of the newspaper, getting black ink all over their fingers, to find his articles. Things are different now. 

He submits a story or two a day to the newspaper’s webpage, and writes two or three entries a day for the newspaper's political blog. He's active on Twitter and Facebook, posting up to thirty tweets a day on state politics. Sometimes, he tweets a cat picture, just for variety.

On this particular day at the Statehouse, Ron has to put the finishing touches on an article for Blue about the underdog candidates in this year's state GOP races. Ron has an encyclopedic knowledge of his state's politicians and access to any contender he wants to talk to. As the Statehouse and Senate open for business for the day, he finishes up his story and emails it to Blue, one hour before deadline.

The other reporters are in the office now, and they start chatting with Ron about what's going on at the State Capitol. Ron fires off a few tweets during the conversation as he checks his Twitter feed and a couple of local politics blogs, and goes through his email, too. The reporters have the streaming feed from the House floor on, the drone of legislators' voices underlies their conversation.

It's while Ron's checking his email that he comes across the material for his first blog post of the day. One of the Republican candidates for governor has just released a video he plans to show at the Republican state assembly in a couple of days. Ron personally thinks this candidate, who's earned the nickname "Honey Badger," doesn't have a chance of winning the governorship, but he doesn't let his opinion color his blog post, which features a link to and a brief summary of the video.

Ron spends the next thirty minutes going over some interview questions—he'll be meeting briefly with a House member before lunch. Then, he puts up a couple more tweets. Then, an email comes in: a GOP candidate for a hotly contested Congressional district has a video up for his campaign. Ron immediately reports this on the politics blog.

It's 10:30AM when Ron heads out of the office and down to the cafeteria in the basement for another cup of coffee. He stops and chats with everyone he knows along the way, and he knows a lot of people. Legislative aides, lobbyists, janitors, legal researchers: they're all happy to shoot the breeze with Ron. He picks up some great gossip from a couple of people, as well as a few ideas for future stories that he'll have to run past his boss, Blue.

At 11:15AM, Ron is in the office of State Representative Goodin Earnest, a doctor and former military man. Rep. Earnest is in his second term at the Statehouse and has interviewed with Ron on four or five other occasions. The two men discuss his bill, which seeks to allow veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder legal access to marijuana as treatment for their condition, at length, and Ron gets a couple of really excellent quotes from the legislator.

After the interview, Ron grabs a bite with one of his fellow reporters, and then it's back to the office to pound out his article on Rep. Earnest's marijuana bill. Every few minutes, he checks his email and his Twitter feed, just to make sure he isn't missing anything. He's halfway done with the article when he gets a call from Blue. The old man's just checking in: Ron runs some story ideas by Blue, and the political director okays one and tells Ron to have it in by tomorrow afternoon at 3:00PM.

It's 2:00PM. Nothing terribly exciting has happened at the Statehouse today; Ron supposes the politicians are saving all the drama up for the weekend and the state assemblies. As legislators begin to leave the State Capitol for commitments in other parts of the city, Ron puts up a few more tweets and another blog post, this one about a crazy right-wing extremist author who's just endorsed the crazy right-wing extremist candidate for governor.

Ron gets back to work on his article about Rep. Earnest's bill. By 4:00PM, the article is finished, and he emails it over to Blue. There's time for a few more tweets, and then he bids his fellow reporters, all working furiously on their own stories, farewell and heads out for the day.

This doesn't mean Ron is off-duty. He's never off-duty, not for the news. He has to be ready to leap on to a story in an instant, no matter the time of day or night. 

Twenty years ago, when he was a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old just starting work as a cub reporter in New Mexico, this wasn't a problem. In fact, he loved the adrenaline rush. Twelve years ago, when Ron took a job at a now-defunct independent newspaper as a crime reporter, he was still able to handle the bustling schedule. But now, even though he loves politics and his job, he's starting to feel his age.

Or maybe it's more than that. While Ron doesn't want to do anything with his life but report the news, he hates the soulless corporation that owns the newspaper he writes for. He hates that the newspaper's content has become so watered down that it's hard to find an actual story amidst all the ads and fluff. He hates that many of his colleagues have left for greener pastures, or been laid off.

Ron eats an early dinner at his apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and flips through the evening news broadcasts. He tweets some more. He goes online and reads up on the state assemblies he'll be attending this weekend—one day dedicated to the Republicans, one day dedicated to the Democrats. He writes most of the article that's due in to Blue tomorrow morning, and closes out the day with a dose of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

The news is in his blood. State politics is in his blood. Maybe someday Ron will take his political expertise and do something other than news reporting. In fact, given the sorry state of the industry, this is likely to happen sooner rather than later. For right now, though, he's going to sit down and write his daily blog about whomever Selena Gomez is dating these days, hoping that the clickstream will help pay his rent.