Learning curves

Since I'm still a greenhorn to journalism, I have a lot of days where I have to deal with both the usual demands - accuracy fairness conciseness completeness and a captivating lede - and figuring out the sheer logistics of a type of story or photo that I have not yet done.

Last night was kind of a perfect storm of both. As I'd written before, the school board here was looking for a fairly significant property tax hike to cover the gap left by the state in this year's budget. Last night was the taxpayer vote to approve that hike, following two hours of a regular meeting at 6 and explanation of the proposed 2009-2010 budget at 7. My story on the regular school board meeting hinged on the results of the tax vote, but my main story would be the results of the tax vote. The tax vote would be the last item in a meeting that started at 8p.m. My deadline was 10:20 p.m. I had already gotten wind that there would be many, many taxpayers showing up to voice their opinions, and the debate portion of these meetings was likely to run long.

So, grasshopper: summarize the results of this very complex debate in which there is much frustration on both sides, take a photo of a frustrated person that will fit into a horizontal photo space, get all the names and numbers right, and do it all on time. And don't drop your camera, laptop, or phone while you're juggling equipment in and out of the lecture hall. I'm sure there were people there who were more tired than me, but I probably had the fullest bladder and the emptiest belly in the room by the time everything wrapped up at 9:20. And I still had to run back to the office and finish writing.

Anyway, so I learned that a laptop can be useful in emergencies when you need to write the middle sections of a story before you know how it will begin and end, that it's STILL obnoxious to be the person who arrives early and sits in the end seat in a lecture hall, and there's a lot of controversy over certain aspects of school district spending that I will have to explore later.

The vote failed, p.s.