Newsrooms are pretty nimble when it comes to handling unexpected situations. Newsworthy events spring up randomly, often bringing new challenges to the story telling process.
So when the coronavirus turned life upside down in March, the rapid-fire changes it pushed on the world didn’t impact news gathering too much. It just dumped a huge volume of really important stories in our laps for weeks on end.
Newspapers kind of thrive in chaos and we have been living in that state for months. The only real hurdle thrown at us was the number of meetings that switched from in-person to virtual. Only lazy reporters would rather cover meetings through a computer screen. It limits the access to public officials and kills after-meeting answer sessions that are a gold mine for information.
But that is a small inconvenience compared to what schools, government agencies, hospitals and various businesses have been going through. Trying to make plans in 2020 is like asking a question to a Magic 8 Ball.
Imagine being a school superintendent trying to put kids in class while meeting health safety standards that are ever changing. Coaches don’t know what testing regulations might look like for their team. Restaurants don’t know when they’ll be told to shut down alcohol sales.
But at the J-T we just kept chugging along. Because a newspaper’s role is to describe the world around it, new mandates just became fresh stories. Whatever happens, react and report.
But sometimes, even when you are conditioned to roll with the punches, a market hog falls on your head.
Years of experience and a stable staff have allowed the J-T to get pretty good at covering the Union County Fair. Our post fair tab is generally a couple dozen pages, contains senior and junior fair results and has more than 100 photos of junior fair project awards and livestock champions.
We know how to cover the awards shows with speed and accuracy, arranging groups of kids, collecting their names and shooting dozens of photos all while the show is still going on.
We’ve also gotten very good at covering the livestock sale. For each animal, we take pictures of the grand and reserve champions and premier exhibitor. This occurs during the sale, as the buyers quickly jump in the ring. Taking the picture is the easy part. It is getting the names of all the buyers that is the challenge. Often multiple businesses will pool their money to purchase a champion animal. It is not uncommon for 10 or more people jump in the ring for the picture. After the photo they exit in different directions as we scramble around to try to get their names, all while the P.A. system blasts the voice of Harley Jackson as he sells the next animal.
We compile all the information, photos and captions (while still publishing the daily paper) and can usually get the Union County Fair Results Guide printed inside of two weeks. It serves as a nice keepsake and is generally well received.
But this year the Showman-of-Showmen was COVID-19.
The fair boards did their best to make timely decisions on how to proceed under various state restrictions. In the end, they opted for a version of the fair which focused on the livestock projects. At the newspaper, we knew this meant that senior fair results and other junior fair projects were lopped off. And with that, about 70 percent of the photos and all of the text for our post fair edition. We immediately knew a separate edition would not work and opted to make the livestock photos a center spread. Those photos appeared in Wednesday’s newspaper.
But as the days passed ahead of the fair, it became apparent that even the livestock sale would not go off as normal, meaning our method of covering it would not work.
Initial reports were that the livestock sale would take place in front of the grandstand. We also learned that the animals would essentially only be on the fairgrounds for one or two days. This meant that during the Saturday sale, the animals would not accompany the sellers. We were also told that the buyers would be asked not to leave the grandstands for photos after purchasing animals.
So we were faced with the idea of shooting photos of individual youths, standing alone in front of the grandstand. It seemed pretty bland to us, so we brainstormed about how to get better photos.
We decided to shoot photos of the grand and reserve champions as they were selected at the market shows throughout the week. We felt that by doing this, we would at least show the exhibitor and the animal in the show ring. It also meant that we had to learn how to cover the market shows, because we had never done it before.
In essence our coverage changed from a sometimes hectic Saturday event, into hours of watching the judging of various animals throughout the week. We quickly learned that there was no way to estimate when champions would be named, as each show is a little different. The only way to get the photo was to sit through each event.
And even then problems cropped up. For example on Sunday, we sent one reporter to take pictures of two shows going on in separate locations. Despite starting at different times, the naming of the champions basically overlapped and we missed out on pictures of one animal. Fortunately we were able to use a photo from the Junior Fair photographer as a backup.
We also decided not to attend the livestock sale, because we already had photos of the exhibitors and their animals and we reasoned the buyers and prices could be gathered on Monday. At some point during fair week, the location was changed again and the sale was held in the rabbit/poultry barn with a little more interaction between buyers and sellers.
What we ended up with was a center section filled with diverse photos of grand and reserve champions, and captions listing the businesses that purchased them. We also listed the premier exhibitors for each animal. It sure wasn’t perfect and was a far cry from the coverage we usually give the livestock sale, but we tried to make the best decision with the information we had at the time.
In this process, we were afforded a small peek behind the curtain in regard to the challenges area decision-makers are facing every day with virus life.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.