We always spring forward in the newsroom

Opinion

Discussion

March 15, 2010

Column by Lauren LaFleur

Lauren LaFleur CNHI The Jacksonville Daily Progress Mon Mar 15, 2010, 08:30 PM CDT

JACKSONVILLE — I’m very human, and so I am very apt to make mistakes.

We’re all prone to make mistakes, I guess. It’s part of being human.

Not everyone makes mistakes on the front page of the paper, though.

And sure enough, one of my mistakes is there at the top of Sunday’s paper in black and white for all the world to see.

I was the one who put “set your clocks back” on the front page Sunday.

It didn’t even register in my head as a mistake. Only this morning, when my boss pointed it out to me, did I realize it.

What a way to start a Monday.

To be honest time doesn’t usually mean much to me, really. It’s something I know I don’t have enough of and probably never will.

In a newsroom, though, it’s always a day ahead, and so when the rest of the world is living “Monday,” everything I do for work has Tuesday’s date on it. It’s the nature of the job.

We strive to plan at least a week in advance, so even as I write this on Monday morning, I already have working around in my brain what will likely be on the front page of your Sunday paper.

I’m also mentally working on a couple of special sections that will be in upcoming editions weeks from now.

I often lose track of what day of the week it is because I am constantly adjusting in my head from “newsroom time” to “real time” — my internal conversations are sometimes pretty funny as a result.

“So, the article about this-and-that was on Wednesday’s front page, which publishes tomorrow, so today must be Tuesday.”

And there are times when I work on pages for the paper weeks in advance. The comics page is one of those — in 45 minutes I can crank out two weeks worth of my part of the comics page.

Covering two weeks worth of time in 45 minutes is, well, weird. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.

Think two parts Alice in Wonderland mixed with one part All The President’s Men, but usually without the scandal.

If my “real time” ran at the pace of my “newsroom time,” and I could accumulate all of the advances in time I experience in my head because of how I have to think and date things, I’d likely be living in 2054 right now.

Just thinking about it makes me feel old.

I’ve tried outsmarting myself when it comes to time — ever set your alarm clock ahead 20 minutes so you would get up that much earlier? I just end up doing math, subtracting 16 minutes from the time on the alarm clock and adding four to the time on the stove.

So if I’m supposed to meet you on a Wednesday, but I don’t show, chances are I beat you to it by 24 hours.

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We always spring forward in the newsroom

Column by Lauren LaFleur

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