A few weeks ago, our intern, Kinly, came into my office and asked what I was doing.
"Working on next year," I said. That confused and surprised her. It makes sense: most news isn't something you can plan for. But much of what we do, and much of what is important to people, takes months of planning.
Only some of what I bring to the planning meeting each year. Ruth Ann, who writes for the Focus, said I looked organized. I think I look like I'm trying to maintain a brain outside of my head.
Today we held our annual planning meeting, which this year was a trek through twelve months, three election cycles, nine special sections (but not the tenth my mom wants us to do), two city guides, four local fairs and various other annual events and stories.
Getting a grasp on what's coming up has become almost a compulsion for me. When I first took over as news editor in 2014, everything was such a blur that I don't even remember the planning meeting, other than the realization that I would have to do all this stuff. I've run the meeting the past few years, with the help of three binders, my planner and my newest addition, a book of to-do lists. It's a little dizzying to wrap my head around all the dates and figuring out which week applies (Wednesday holidays this year mean July 4 and Halloween coverage will be a week late, which is frustrating), but once I have the whole year on a single piece of paper, I have some peace of mind.
With a staff as small as ours, it's important to know what's coming up so we can make sure that if it's somewhere someone needs to be, we have someone there (usually me), and if someone can't be there, that we have it arranged that someone will at least get us a picture. It also gives us a chance to think about how we can best present that information. The earliest someone lets us know that news is coming, the better.
So, now I feel like I have a grasp on what 2018 is going to look like. There will be curveballs, sure, maybe even curveballs as large as August 2016, when we had to hold almost everything on the list because our entire paper was full of coverage about the police department. But, having that list meant that once things were back to normal, we knew where we had left off. As much as I can sit here and map out week by week what I need to keep track of all year, one of my favorite things about my job is that it's never entirely formulaic.