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Updated 1:07pm - Mar 12, 2010
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Opinion Editor's Note: Abundant chances for 2nd-guessing
Editor's Note: Abundant chances for 2nd-guessing
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When I go home for the night, the next day’s newspaper isn’t finished. That’s the job of Assistant Editor Matthew Durkee and Sports Editor Bill Choy, who work later shifts and produce most of the pages. This allows for two forms of second-guessing. First, I sometimes find myself thinking of things I forgot or maybe should have done differently. Since Matt and Bill are still there, I can phone in a change. That encourages me to keep thinking about things that I probably should let go of once I walk out the door. One night Laura and I had two reporters over after work and I mentioned that I still wasn’t satisfied with a headline I’d written for a front-page story. We spent the next half-hour playing something of a party game in which we tried to come up with a better headline. I took the top alternative emerging from the brainstorming and phoned it in to Matt, who talked me into sticking with the original headline.
Even less productive is second-guessing decisions of the night-siders
that I find in print the next morning. Take the Saturday photo of
lupines blossoming off Bald Hills Road. It appeared on Page A3 in vivid
… black and white. I haven’t spoken to Matt about this — but he does
read this column before it’s printed so he’ll know then. Anyway, I
could see why he did it: the only other color page besides A1 took the
“jump” of the storm-chaser story and its accompanying photos, including
one of softball-sized hail. This left no color for the lupine photo,
but it was still important to run it Saturday and let people know about
the wildflower explosion down south in case they wanted to check it out
over Memorial Day weekend.
Laura and I did just that Saturday morning, and encountered technical difficulties. It wasn’t that the lupines appeared in black and white like on Page A3, but it was close: They were mostly shrouded by a cloud bank that clung almost to the top of the Bald Hills. I got out and shot photos anyway and they actually came out nice — a blast of purple moodier with a foggy-gray background instead of blue. I’ll try to get one into the Wednesday edition, in color. More journeys the next day It was mission impossible, but it spoke volumes about the quality of employees at Crescent City hardware stores. We toured all three Sunday as Laura searched for obscure wooden products she needed to build pergolas. Not a single store carried them, but the employees worked oh-so-hard to try to find alternatives that would work. At two of the places, workers were walking around carrying the pergola recipe she’d ripped from a magazine, searching for ways to improvise. At the third, the guy was just flat-out sure he didn’t carry what we sought, but he said it with a competent smile and time-saving finality. Then we toured some places north of town I’d been hankering to visit since hitting Del Norte County 17 months ago. We meandered through the campground at Florence Keller County Park (in the middle of a three-day weekend there were still empty campsites ensconced in this deep-dark patch of redwood wonderland) and then drove the length of Wonder Stump Road. The latter afforded striking stretches of narrow pavement straight through corridors of the tall stuff, private driveways reminding us we were in a large-lot suburb, not a national forest. We had our eyes peeled, of course, for a wonder stump; but to no avail. Did we just miss it? Back home I consulted the oracles of Google and read about the Del Norte Wonder Tree, a 9-foot-thick redwood that grew out of the fallen trunk of an 8-foot-thick colleague. It was the stuff of yesteryear’s postcards, and even then it had long since been cut down, presumably converting the Wonder Tree into a Wonder Stump. Can I get a little help on this one? Is it somewhere on Wonder Stump Road, and if not, why not? ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) |
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