A day in the life of the Winnipeg Free Press
On Thursday, July 13, the Winnipeg Free Press newsroom had 62 people scheduled to work, including five summer interns. (Ten regular staffers were on vacation.)
The efforts of only a couple dozen of them would have been obvious to people reading Free Press stories produced that day. The complex choreography that allows a news organization to cover daily news while also juggling features and investigations happens largely behind the scenes.
For instance, literary editor Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson was working nine days ahead on the Saturday book section for July 22. He sorts through 40 to 50 books a week, deciding which to send to his three dozen freelance reviewers for the eight reviews he needs. And the arts department was finishing its exhaustive coverage plan for the upcoming Winnipeg Fringe Festival, featuring 188 shows over 12 days.
And so on and so on, in every department, through every level of planning, reporting, editing and production.
The first shift on July 13 started at 6 a.m. The final story was posted online at 12:10 a.m. July 14. Here are some highlights behind the day.
6 a.m. — early arrivals
Carl DeGurse starts the first assignment shift, scanning other media sites, checking overnight emails, answering the phone and co-ordinating the nine general-assignment reporters available on this day. Photographer Wayne Glowacki and videographer Mike Deal are covering Jimmy Carter’s visit to a Habitat for Humanity build in Winnipeg. Security for former U.S. presidents being what it is, they had to apply for accreditation weeks ago, and they have to be on site by 6:30, though Carter’s first scheduled event isn’t until 8 a.m.
8:00 — The press pen
Carter and his wife Rosalynn — longtime volunteers with Habitat for Humanity, the organization in which low-income families help build their own homes — arrive and Glowacki is taking photos from what organizers “call the press pen,” he says later. “Like a pig pen? — this little picket-fenced area.” He’s hemmed in but gets a photo he likes and transmits it for a quick website post, using Wi-Fi to connect his camera to his phone. He had prepared a few captions the previous night, using the official Carter agenda as a guide, so he could work faster today.
9:03 — First of many
Melissa Martin’s first story is posted on the Free Press website. She’ll be writing and tweeting about the Carters throughout their visit.
9:15 — The legislature reporter
Larry Kusch has spent months writing about the Manitoba government’s health reforms, including a front-page story in this morning’s paper about cuts to outpatient physiotherapy services. He lets the assignment editor know he’ll be following more angles on this, including trying to get “what my editors call ‘a real person,’ ” in this case an outpatient. He’ll also check tips on a couple of other issues.
9:45ish — Carter collapses
Jimmy Carter has been working on a Habitat house with hammer and saw in the hot sun for an hour. Martin is in her car recharging her phone. Photographers have moved to a nearby tent for a 10:45 press conference. Glowacki hangs back for a few minutes, and that’s when the 92-year-old Carter wobbles and drops to his knees. His security people close in.
Ignoring a Habitat person who says “You shouldn’t be taking pictures of that,” Glowacki gets the best photos he can through the crowd, “and then I got my phone and I messaged to Melissa and to Mike to come back here.”
Deal had been setting up his video equipment in the tent. “I grabbed my camera off my tripod,” forgetting it was wired to a soundboard, he says later. “I forgot and I pulled it and everyone’s like, what’s going on? I just ignored everyone and ran off.” He’s shooting as he goes, and realizes he has captured Carter in the distance. He gets 16 seconds of Carter’s head bobbing among the phalanx of security.
10 — The morning meeting
Yesterday’s physio cuts story is the top performer on the website, and as senior editors discuss the day’s plans, one of them suggests an additional angle for Kusch to pursue: How will this affect people getting knee and hip replacements, a growth field for baby boomers? The rest of the lineup is straightforward. Coverage of the Carter visit was long-planned, so little is said about it — until photo editor Mike Aporius gets an email about Carter’s collapse. He runs out of the meeting to find out more.
10:19, 10:42, 11:01, 11:29 — Online updates
Martin has looked at the photographers’ stills and video footage and is emailing updates to her original web story. She’s still tweeting.
11:45 — Home page down
There’s a whoosh as editor-in-chief Paul Samyn stalks out the newsroom door to the technology department, cursing. The website’s home page isn’t loading. The problem lasts about 15 minutes but the timing is bad: There’s usually a readership peak around noon, and today the Free Press also has the Carter collapse. It turns out the U.S. company behind the publishing platform was doing technical work — something out of the newspaper’s hands, Samyn says later. “I told them, ‘One of your former U.S. presidents has collapsed in our city. We need it up and operational and we need it now.’ ”
11:45 — The raw clip
Deal has an exclusive in his video clip of Carter being helped by security, though it was shot at a distance, and Canadian and U.S. news outlets are calling to see if it’s available. He comes in from the Habitat site to produce a raw clip for possible use elsewhere, and then a version for the Free Press that highlights Carter’s head in the crowd, frame by frame. He couldn’t have done that video treatment on his phone on-site, he says.
Samyn is being cautious with allowing outside use of the clip. “In today’s world,” he says, “no one’s going to hear it was the Winnipeg Free Press that did it” if they see it on another site.
Noon — Two-headed reporter
Mike McIntyre is covering the Winnipeg Goldeyes baseball game tonight, but he shows up at the ballpark press box at noon. He has a feature to write, and he wants a quiet location.
McIntyre is both a sportswriter and a projects reporter on the justice beat. After years of covering the courthouse, he wanted a change but didn’t want to waste the good sources he had built up. Now he covers games and tournaments, and fits his justice work around them — usually.
More than once, the roles have overlapped. A source gave him information about the murder of a bus driver one night when he was covering a Winnipeg Jets NHL game. He toggled back and forth on his laptop: hockey story, murder story, hockey story ... “There would be a whistle and then I’d write a few paragraphs of the murder story, and then I’d write a few paragraphs for my working copy on the Jets game.”
Today, looking out over the empty green baseball diamond, he’s writing about Crown attorneys and post-traumatic stress disorder.
12:15 p.m. — The editorial
Perspectives editor Brad Oswald usually has several editorials in the works. Today he’ll run one about a change in Canadian Press style to capitalize the words Indigenous and Aboriginal. Oswald has discussed the piece with editor Samyn and now, as he always does, he emails it to the editorial writers scattered in different departments for their comments. There is little feedback today, probably because “the CP style change is one most folks think was overdue,” he says.
12:20 — Final questions
Alexandra Paul was assigned the coming weekend’s big feature back in February: writing about the 200th anniversary of the Selkirk Treaty, which brought peace to the region and created the settlement that became Winnipeg.
While still working news shifts, she’s been sorting through treaty accounts and interpretations and trying to track down descendants. Her research material fills a grocery box beside her desk.
She began talking to associate editor Scott Gibbons about the reporting and writing at the beginning of June. Now, just hours before the Saturday feature pages go to press as a preprinted section, she and Gibbons are dealing with final questions, like the different spellings that various sources have of some Indigenous names.
2:00 — Too much for one plate
Legislature reporter Kusch has gathered many of the followup details he wants on the physio cuts, some from a good source at the hospital. He has also checked out another story that proved untrue, and wrote up a quick assessment of several cabinet ministers to help a columnist.
Now he hears of another health cut and that CBC and CTV are chasing it. He has too much on the go, so he phones city editor Shane Minkin, who assigns a news reporter to the story.
2:00— Story behind the story
Randy Turner sits down to write a short feature he researched yesterday. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre was mentioned in a Tuesday story about B.C. wildfires; it’s based in Winnipeg but no one knows much about it. Turner was asked to check it out, see if there was more to say. There is.
When he went to the centre’s office, “it was just a bunch of guys sitting at their desks, so it didn’t look visually exciting,” he says later. “But when they started to explain how it worked, I thought, ‘This is pretty cool.’ ”
He did the interviews, lined up a photographer and transcribed his tapes. The writing now will take a couple of hours. The story will fill most of a page in Friday’s paper.
“Not everything has to be breaking news,” Turner says. “There’s lots of room, or should be, for stories that explain things about the news.”
4:00 — 2 minutes 44 seconds
Before Carter collapsed (it turns out to have been dehydration, and he recovered well), Deal had shot 32 clips of him talking to volunteers and working on a house. Deal edits this into a video that comes in at two minutes, 44 seconds. Not knowing how accessible Carter would be, he had been to the Habitat site several times earlier in the week to shoot B-roll. None of it is used today.
5:53 — Multi-tasking
Kusch has most of the interviews he needs and files his story. He didn’t get a current physio patient. “Yet I was able to recreate what a patient might have told me from what I gleaned from the folks I did get,” he says. “On so many days, reporters have a lot on the go. If you work on one story at a time, there are many days where you might not file anything.”
10:30 — 3 stories later . . .
Mike McIntyre had filed his 2,000-word PTSD feature just in time to watch the Goldeyes take batting practice at 4 p.m. He interviewed a new player and wrote a 700-word profile before game time at 7. Now he files 350 words on the game itself — his last story of a long day.
In the newsroom, print and digital editors are still at work.