The news staff that refuses to slowdown

It wasn’t supposed to last this long.

I remember that day — March

16, a Monday — as if it were yesterday, because I had some hard news to share with our staff.

It went something like this: “Effective immediately, we’ll be working from our homes. We’re hoping this virus will blow over in a couple of weeks and we can get back to normal.”

We packed our computers, left our daily assignments written on the whiteboard — they’re still there — and went our separate ways.

We had no way of knowing it would be the last time that particular group of Enterprise-Record journalists would stand in the same room together.

After all, why would we think this was anything other than a temporary deal? Our president was telling us this whole thing would “disappear.” The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, stood in Chinatown and insisted “everything is fine here. Come because precautions have been taken.”

It’ll just blow over… right?

Instead, it went south, and in a hurry. It took a while to make a big impact locally, but nationally, we soon stopped counting cases and deaths with single or even double- digit numbers.

The human toll has been huge. So, too, has been the toll on businesses and life as we, well, knew it.

Fromour corner of the world, it meant fewer advertisers. That, in turn, meant less revenue, which meant furloughs for some of our staff members — some of whom remain furloughed today.

For those of us with 40plus years’ worth of ink in our veins, it was unprecedented. I remember back around May, and June, thinking was just about the craziest time I’d seen in the business.

Turns out “crazy” was just getting warmed up.

The pandemic wasn’t just hurting our staffing level — it was taking up a fair amount of the manpower we had left, because the case count exploded locally and there was a whole lot of reporting to do.

Then we rolled into election season. We shuffled things around, put our sports staff to work covering news and dove into election coverage, because there was a lot of reporting that needed to be done — while still covering coronavirus and the dozens of other things we routinely cover every week. And, worst of all, we had to coordinate everything without ever being in the same room. A tiny Zoom screen is a very poor substitute for daily interaction.

Then … the fires blew up. All over Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties. We had another 24-hour-a-day story that needed to be covered.

Suddenly, we were in full-blown “react” mode every day. It felt like covering a chessboard against an aggressive opponent while missing your bishop, knight and a couple of rooks.

Mainly, it meant long hours and unbelievable workloads that continue to this day.

You know what? My staff never complains. Not one time. The biggest challenge I’ve faced has been trying to get most of them to occasionally stop working and take some time off; sadly, I’ve failed miserably.

So, today, I’mgoing to use this space to thank themfor what they’re doing — and, in a few cases, let you know more about it.

Carin Dorghalli went to Berry Creek in the early morning hours of Sept. 8 expecting to photograph a fire. She got there to find her family’s store burned to the ground. She kept working anyway, and the photographs and stories she produced captured the raw human emotion of that fire’s devastation like nothing else could. I’ve never been in a situation where I had to keep working after something like that; I’m still not sure how she’s done it.

There’s a rough target of “two stories per day” in our business. One week, I noticed Natalie Hanson was being even more productive than usual. So I did a count: 19 bylined stories in a week, none of them short or easy. Nineteen stories in a week? That’s like Barry Bonds hitting 100 home runs instead of merely 73 in 2001.

Will Denner and Sharon Martin are award-winning sportswriters, among the best I’ve worked with. Suddenly they were being asked to cover beats like breaking news (including fires and crime), and education, and coronavirus, and supervisor meetings. They’re hitting it out of the park. And so is Justin Couchot, another sportswriter who was informed he was the new weekend news reporter.

While the fires were blowing up, I knew we needed immediate help with reporting, editing and photography. Fortunately, we solved all three by bringing back Rick Silva. I called him with the news around 8 in the morning; by 8:15, he’d downed a cup of coffee and was heading toward the flames, a task he knows all too well.

Laura Urseny — there’s not enough room in this column. She kept doing each of her multiple beats while also helping with fire updates and being a sound voice of reason for our editorial board and our newspaper in general. Steve Schoonover, still the worst example of “retired” to be found, delivered key stories no one else could get to. And our longtime Oroville Mercury-Register correspondent, Kyra Gottesman, has been the closest thing to an additional staff member we could hope to have, diving in to help whenever necessary. (AB5’s efforts to reduce her byline count be damned.)

And finally, behind the scenes, city editor Dan Reidel kept the trains running, on time, and the bases covered, flawlessly, amidst the chaos every single day.

That’s it. Those 10 people have been responsible for all of the coverage you’ve seen this summer and fall for the August Complex fires, the North Complex fires, the coronavirus pandemic and its impact locally, the elections at the local and regional levels, all of the usual city council and county supervisors and parks news, the coverage of the unrest following the killing of George Floyd and, yes — even the occasional “good news” story, which we’re determined to keep bringing regardless of how little of it there is to find these days.

I often say “You’ve got to love this job to do it. Otherwise, why would we do it?”

Our staff does, and frankly, the numbers barely begin to tell the story. We have no way of knowing when we’ll get back to “normal” in this world, but we should all take a moment and be thankful we’ve been blessed with such abnormally dedicated local journalists to keep us informed in the meantime.

I know I am.