Any organization, large or small, in the public or private sector, feels the extra burden when staff go on their well-deserved holidays. Only the essential work those individuals regularly do gets done while they're away, while the bigger jobs are left until the operation is fully staffed once again.
The Citizen newsroom is no different.
When reporters or editors go on holiday, the remaining staff have to keep doing their jobs while filling in on relief for their vacationing colleagues.
Our newsroom is populated by journalists who are mostly editors but do a little bit of writing here and there (Jason Peters, Arthur Williams, Rodney Venis and Tyler Sabourin), full-time reporters with editing responsibilities (Mark Nielsen, Frank Peebles and Ted Clarke), reporters who also take on editing chores when needed (Charelle Evelyn, Samantha Wright Allen and Andrea Johnson), our online editor Christine Hinzmann who does some reporting and Brent Braaten, who strictly handles photography.
When two reporters are on holiday, that is two fewer individuals available to pursue local news and sports stories.
When a reporter and an editor are away, it's still like having two reporters away because one of the reporters (Charelle, Samantha or Andrea) has to move into an editor's chair, designing pages, choosing stories, writing headlines and so on.
When Christine is away, other reporters and editors update the website and post material to Facebook and Twitter. When Brent is away, we often hire a contractor to shoot photos but we also ask reporters to take their own photographs, which means they have less time to write stories.
We rarely have two editors away at the same time but it does happen from time to time, due to overlapping weekly shifts. On Wednesday, April 8, for example, a Monday-Friday editor and a Wednesday-Sunday editor were both on vacation, as was a reporter. Wednesday is our biggest production day in the newsroom since Thursday is the largest newspaper of the week. In this case, the Thursday, April 9, edition was 52 pages and we were down three staff members or nearly one-quarter of our entire newsroom.
Thank God nobody called in sick but if they had, we would have soldiered on somehow!
Like all businesses, we do our best to not let our reduced staffing levels affect customer service or the quality of our product but alert, longtime readers notice. They see that there are fewer local stories, longer news features, more news wire and out-of-town stories.
To varying degrees, all of us in the newsroom have heard "you must have been on holiday last week because I didn't see your byline" from fellow reporters at other news outlets, sources, acquaintances and attentive readers.
While editors are more likely to schedule vacation time around their personal lives (one editor, for example, always takes time off around the four major men's professional golf championships each year), reporters tend to work around both their personal and professional commitments.
For instance, one Citizen reporter takes days off whenever a certain rock band is touring and is willing to travel great distances and multiple time zones to see said band (12 times and counting). Another reporter, a devoted volunteer with a prominent service club, has booked time this year to attend the club's major international conference. Yet both of those reporters juggle their vacations around major events in their respective beats and often choose their beats first. Sports reporters avoid taking holidays during junior hockey playoffs and news reporters make sure they're at their desk during elections.
Mark, the Citizen's police and court reporter, scheduled his vacation time over the last 12 months around two major scheduled events within his beat - the Cody Legebokoff murder trial last summer and the coroner's inquest into the Lakeland Mills sawmill tragedy this past spring.
In other words, reporters don't want to miss the excitement and challenge of covering the big stories in their respective beats, so they often plan their vacations during the quieter periods. It's the equivalent of accountants and financial planners not booking tax season off.
Which also explains why I'm off this week. The Lakeland inquest won't resume until next month and the federal election isn't until the fall. And I sleep well when I'm on holiday, knowing the newsroom is in good hands. Except for this coming Friday, I'm the only one away and this is a veteran group that knows what to do and they are led by two veteran editors - Jason and Arthur - in my absence.
See you next week!
