Hard day's night

Tuesday was another long day/night at the ASNE Reporter. Not as long as Monday, but it was close. Our work flow is getting a little smoother as students and editors get used to the routine of our temporary newspaper.

A little smoother. In the photos you can see editors (including my boss, Chris Beringer, top) hard at work. It was a big push at the end as late copy came in, photos were changed and headlines rewritten. Just like a real newspaper: hours of tedium followed by minutes of panic.

We're located deep in the heart of the JW Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue. The sun doesn't penetrate here. I walked outside at lunch. It was about 80 degrees and people were enjoying lunch in the sun. Amazing. There is life outside the Marriott. How did that happen?

The bar was filled with editors last night, many in full convention mode. Think "Animal House" meets "Fight Club": lots of war stories and bragging about past exploits. The future for our industry (and this group) is tinged with uncertainty, however. What will this group look like in a few years? Will it even exist? Or will it save itself (and its industry) by radically reinventing itself?

All good questions with no quick answers.

The daily miracle

We made it.

Our first day/night of producing the ASNE Reporter was challenging, to say the least (we knew our original deadline was optimistic and we didn't make it but still had time to spare). The resulting publication looks pretty good. Click here to see the online version.

It didn't help that one of the fonts I brought had a problem. The italic font was corrupted and kept crashing when the pages arrived at the print site (Gannett's facility in Springfield, Virginia). We had to hunt down the bad fonts on several pages, reformatting whole stories at the last minute. Ick. My co-designers, Jay McDaniel and Tiffany Sakato, were great, learning new software and producing great-looking pages on a tight schedule.

Tomorrow looks to be a bit easier. Whew!

Celebrity moment: Exhausted, Chris Beringer, Sandra Long and I made our way to the Marriott bar for food and big drinks. Who should be sitting at the next table but Dick Gregory, the social activist, and his entourage (Google him, younger folks, he's important). We were cool and tried, very casually, to hear what they were talking about (Gregory had everyone laughing) but without luck.

Ah, the celebrity life of D.C.!

Washington, D.C.

Curious that the two most recent trips I've taken for work are to places that are warmer and more humid than Seattle. What's that all about?

In D.C. for the ASNE Convention, helping students produce the convention newspaper. The paper is a model newsroom meant to reflect the ethnic diversity of the United States. I worked on it last year and it's fun and challenging. It's amazing that a group of people, most of whom have never met before, can get together and, in a couple of days, organize a news operation and produce four daily papers.

Saturday morning we had a little free time. Chris, my boss, and I walked to the White House. Security there is pervasive. Lots of police and people in unmarked cars watching and listening. The Ellipse in front of the White House is surrounded by cyclone fences and closed. The streets in front of and behind the building are shut to traffic.

Tourists still gather on the Lafayette Park side of the building to take pictures and engage in some free speech (see the photo above). You hear languages from all over the world there. George and Laura Bush did not make an appearance.

The Corcoran Gallery had the terrific show on Modernism from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We went to see it. Really fascinating with some great examples of modernist art, design and architecture. What started as a utopian movement to bring good art and design to the masses became ingrained in popular culture in surprising ways.

More photos on my Flickr feed.