It’s Super Bowl Sunday. As I post this, millions of people all over the country, if not the world, are tuning in for the biggest sports event of the year.
Not me.
Old habits are hard to break. I spent more than 20 years working a Sunday-Thursday shift for a morning daily newspaper. I was uniquely suited for this shift because I was the only sports agnostic in the newsroom. That meant that I could do my work without having to watch every second of The Big Game.
The two drawbacks: For about five years, I was the paper’s business editor. That meant I had to watch the overpriced, overproduced Super Bowl ads as part of my job. I also happened to have the best seat in the house. The newsroom’s only television hung from the wall directly behind the copy and layout desk across from me.
The copy editors and the sports desk were cool. They’d bring in Super Bowl spreads and chips and wings and other goodies and set them out on the table behind the copy desk. This would give everyone the excuse to linger in front of the TV for most of the evening.
If this sounds like shirking, it wasn’t. The copy flow on Super Bowl Sunday is different from any other night. The reporters all file early. The pages get laid out either from the early copy or late, after the game.
The bottleneck is the desk editor, who moves the copy from the reporters to layout. In other words, me.
So really, I’m doing just what I did for more than two decades. I’m writing and editing through the Big Game. No harm, no foul.
You might say it’s a win-win.
This week’s journey through my journal of my first year as a freelancer was unusually busy, but I also had the time to post them into blog entries. Traffic was up, partly because of the increased posts and partly because I shared these with a Facebook group of my college fraternity friends. Some are contemporaries of these events, which adds to the fun.
Outside of the blog, I’m putting aside material for two (no, three!) short nonfiction books and continued volunteer work on our church website and Guidestar profile. This week will include more church work, year-end bookkeeping, and an assortment of podcasts and audiobooks as I travel from one site to another on personal business.
And now we return to your regularly scheduled programming ….
In case you missed it …
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Budding Writer, 1980: Country Journal?
Reading Time: 3 minutes He had a reputation as “the finest historian of the American Revolution.” I was merely a smart-ass Dartmouth undergrad interm at the time.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1980: Coalitions and competition
Reading Time: 2 minutes I didn’t even know my rival was living and working right in our coverage area. That’s a failure of competitive intelligence.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1980: Missing the mark
Reading Time: 2 minutes A little spare time can be a dangerous thing. It can even become addictive.
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Journeyman Journalist, 1980: Things in common
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’m not the kind to burn my bridges, but I have been known to walk away and let them rot. In fact, I was thinking about doing just that
