Essay by Ed Quillen
Journalism – August 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
TALK ABOUT BAD TIMING. In the most recent (July) edition, which was mailed on June 21, we had a short feature that explained why there are “Bring back the railroad” posters all over Salida. I’d seen the posters last winter, and eventually got around to finding the person behind them; then I got around to interviewing him and writing the piece – which sat around for a month or two until we had a good space for it.
There hadn’t been any special reason to hurry that article into print, since we like to keep a small inventory of such pieces (because having them at hand greatly simplifies putting the magazine together).
The fellow behind the posters was John Wagner of Salida, a 62-year-old artist and the owner of Wagner Marionettes, a traveling puppet show. I saw the marionettes hanging around when I was at his house interviewing him, and was impressed at how naturally they moved when he demonstrated a couple of them. Martha was also impressed when she saw the marionettes on his website: “That guy is really good. We ought to run an art feature on him sometime.”
On June 22, the day after we mailed the July edition, Wagner was arrested on charges of sexual exploitation of a child, sexual assault on a child in a position of trust, and unlawful sexual contact. The charges were based on alleged incidents in May which resulted in a warrant for a May 27 search of Wagner’s residence. The first I heard of it was in the June 23 edition of the Mountain Mail, which had a front-page story detailing the charges. Then there was a letter from one of Wagner’s friends, saying it was impossible for the man he knew to have committed such acts and there must be some horrible misunderstanding. A few days later, a story said Wagner had posted bail.
And Wagner is innocent until and unless a court finds otherwise. I know that, and I know that this really has nothing to do with whether a steam-powered tourist train between Buena Vista and Salida is a viable enterprise or a pipe dream. But I still wish we’d run that piece a month earlier, or else the arrest had happened a week earlier, so that we could have run something else last month. Because as things happened, Wagner’s campaign to “bring back the railroad” certainly wasn’t the most pressing issue facing the artist by the time we came out.
Bad timing, though, is an occupational hazard. A lot of things can happen between the time you put an edition together and the time it gets into a reader’s hands.
That’s the nature of a printed medium that must be physically delivered. Sometimes I speculate about escaping from that by moving to electronic publication and delivery – especially since two of our major expenses are printing and postage. But somehow, dispatching a 12-megabyte PDF file to subscribers to print off for themselves, or arranging our web site to work more like a publication – even if the content is the same — are not the same as assembling a paper that you can enjoy while sitting on the toilet.
And even though the electronic edition could be updated daily, or hourly, or whatever, there would still be a lag.
FOR EXAMPLE, on July 5, the police were going around Salida with bullhorns telling us to boil our water until Friday. But the Mountain Mail couldn’t come out with that news until the next day, so I tried to find news about it on the local radio stations that evening. But either they missed it or I tuned in at the wrong time.
Clearly, there’s always going to be a lag, no matter how frequently you publish. In fact, there was even a lag between the time we heard the bull horns announcing the city’s water problems, and we got the real story. At first all we could hear was: “By order of … Salida Public Works … water … until Friday…” So we figured that there was a broken line, and there’d be no outside watering until Friday.
I moved to the front porch to hear better, and finally the trucks drew close enough to be clear about fifteen minutes later. And for once my timing wasn’t lamentable — I wasn’t sitting there with a giant glass of ice water.
Sometimes, however, newscasters have no choice but to figure that their audience is composed of smart people who are aware of this interval between actual events and the news — and of its hazards.
OF THE PLACES I’ve worked, I always felt it worst at weekly newspapers. I used to fill in for a week or two at the Wet Mountain Tribune in Westcliffe so that publisher Jim Little could take an occasional vacation (the paper has grown sufficiently so that the regular staff can handle the vacations now).
And one time we left out an announcement of some upcoming event that would be over by the time the next paper came out. We couldn’t hope people would find out from the radio station, because there wasn’t one. Or from the work of the Pueblo Chieftain’s local correspondent, because there wasn’t one. The Trib was the only show in town, and we blew it on that item, pure and simple.
Another lag problem came when we ran the weekly Middle Park Times in Kremmling years ago. A diabetic girl had died at a small resort in Grand Lake, which was run by a woman who claimed she could cure diabetes with the proper diet and exercise regimen. She was charged with some degree of murder in the girl’s death – my memory is slipping here. What I do remember is that the trial got underway on a Monday with jury selection, and on Tuesday the prosecution began presenting its case. I was there both days, but on Wednesday we had to put the paper together. I figured I could return to the courthouse in Hot Sulphur Springs on Thursday, after I had distributed the paper, which had a big story about the trial, and pick it up from there.
But when I was distributing the paper, I ran into one of the jurors eating breakfast in a local café. I asked him why he was there, instead of in the jury box, and he said “Oh, didn’t you hear? They came to a sentence agreement and she pleaded guilty yesterday morning.” The lag struck again; my big front-page story was basically irrelevant by the time people saw it.
The conventional wisdom in the industry is that weeklies are easier than dailies, but I’ve edited both, and the daily is easier. At a daily, if you leave something out of the Wednesday paper that should have been in there, you can almost always run it Thursday without anyone being the worse off – you don’t have to wait a whole week.
So at a daily newspaper where there are other media, your responsibilities to the community are not as intense as at a weekly where there are no other media. And the more responsibility, the harder the job. So dailies are easier.
Also, there’s not as much lag-time worry with a daily as with publications that come out less frequently – like this monthly. But in some ways, Colorado Central is the easiest sort of publication time-wise because we aren’t the primary news source, which follows court cases and issues day by day. Instead, we specialize in looking at the big, long-term issues. For the most part, we wait and see where a story is going before we pursue it. But that doesn’t always preclude embarrassing moments — or fortuitous instances.
MOST OF OUR ARTICLES come from freelancers, and stories often have to be planned months in advance. And occasionally we’ve been very lucky. Last summer I was talking with Allen Best, who writes a lot of wildlife-management pieces. I was confused by piecemeal accounts of wolf recovery and re-introduction, and figured I’d understand the issue better if somebody put the pieces together into a big coherent story. And I figured that if I was perplexed but curious and interested, so were other people, so it was a good topic for a story – especially in January or February, when there’s not a lot going on around here.
So Allen and I agreed on that last summer, five or six months before the story was to appear in print. And lo and behold, all sorts of wolf stories relevant to Colorado were in the news when we published Allen’s article this January. We had no way of knowing that was coming, but it made us look right on top of things, and it worked out well for Allen, too, because he could use the research he’d done for us to write other articles for other publications, thereby giving him more income from the same work.
Or a few years before that, Chas Clifton of Wetmore pitched us a story about a controlled burn planned by the Forest Service in his neck of the woods. The burn was several months in the future, and there was plenty of time to write the story. But with lots of lead time, there’s also lots of opportunity for the story to fall apart. We were able to publish that story, however, just as forest fires were on everybody’s mind because huge blazes were raging in several parts of the state.
But there have been other times when I guessed wrong. I once figured RS-2477 was going to be a big issue, one I didn’t understand very well, so I researched it hard and wrote a long story for this magazine. And though RS-2477 (it concerns rights-of-way across public lands) pops up every now and again, it’s never turned into a big issue. I guessed wrong about what might happen in the interval between article-idea and publication.
SUCH TALES OF GOOD and bad guesses could continue indefinitely, without making any of us wiser. It’s just that sometimes you curse the timing of your publication, because it means you can’t serve your readers as well as you’d like to.
For instance, this edition is scheduled for mailing on July 19, which means the bulk of it has to be put together by July 14 or so to allow for proof-reading and last-minute adjustments and the like by our “staff” of two part-timers.
But on July 15, all sorts of interesting stuff could happen with the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District. That’s the date of a scheduled hearing by the district judge on UAWCD’s petition to expand into eastern Frémont County. There are filings with the court which allege the petitions contain invalid signatures, and there’s a good question as to whether this would require an election under Colorado’s TABOR amendment, since property taxes would rise in the expansion area. Further, Chaffee County has asked the court to hear its argument against expansion, since there are three reservoirs that are owned by the county, but managed by UAWCD, and the county wants to be sure its citizens’ interests are protected. And the judge was supposed to have appointed three new directors by June 1, but hasn’t yet, which could mean some kind of legal limbo state for the UAWCD.
In other words, this could be major stuff, at least for those of us who follow Colorado’s water politics, especially in Central Colorado. But it could be that the judge will just postpone everything on July 15 to give all parties more time to address various issues, and so there’s no immediate story.
Sure, I’d like to have the whole story in this edition, but the timing just won’t work if we’re going to meet our schedules. That happens sometimes. In some pursuits, it may be true that “timing is everything,” but in this business, you just have to take things as they come, and realize that events are going to make you feel foolish from time to time.
— Ed Quillen