By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
DEC. 17, 2021 | It doesn’t hurt to be under pressure to see how you fare.
Now what to me seems tame these days was right up there in a pressured situation back in my early days in a newsroom. It was the first Friday night in September with me just starting to work on The Macon Telegraph, the morning newspaper. Previously I had been on the afternoon paper, and moved to the a.m. paper on Labor Day.
The week was routine, with me covering the “police beat,” checking stories at the sheriff’s office, the Macon police and the hospital. That didn’t prepare me for what I suddenly faced Friday night…..when the telephones started ringing off the hook about 9:45 that night.
Persons on the scene at high school football games started calling in their reports, as the phones kept ringing one-after-the-other for the next hour and a half. Everybody in the newsroom, about 15 of us, suddenly became sports writers, taking notes from those correspondents at the game site, getting not just the scores, but the highlights as seen by those at the game, then compiling the important box score per quarters, and if time, who and how players scored.
You might imagine all these guys (no ladies then) talking at once to high school correspondents, having difficulty hearing, and working to accurately gather the details. And we had to do it by about 11:15, the deadline for the down state edition.
In those days, towns circling Macon from as far north as Forsyth, Monticello and Eatonton, as far east as Milledgeville and Sandersville, then south to Vidalia, Lyons, Dublin and Fitzgerald, over to Cordele, Perry and Fort Valley….and all those towns in between, were the Telegraph’s coverage map. People in each of those towns and others wanted to see their team’s score, but also wanted to see what their regional competitors in other towns were doing.
Our job was to get the scores reported, so the presses could roll on time to get those papers to these distant cities by the morning. People would be waiting!
So yes, the entire male reporting staff, including the copy editors, the news editor, and even the managing editor himself, would be manning telephones. It was an intense period, and for me that first week on the job, I was bamboozled after experiencing this new wrinkle.
Once the papers started off the press, a bundle came immediately to the newsroom and we each checked out stories….for errors. Sometimes we had to stop the press and put in a correction, a costly and time-consuming process. We made sure we got it right.
The telephone was the main connector with distant reporters back then. Even the capitol reporter in those days, who was Reg Murphy, would phone in his report of the Legislature action about 7 p.m. at night. Whoever was free in the newsroom took his dictation, me often included. I had known Reg from Mercer days. He later became editor of the Atlanta newspapers, then famous when he was kidnapped. He then became the publisher in San Francisco and Baltimore, and later head of the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Golf Association. He’s retired at Sea Island today.
Even Reg was once a Friday night sports reporter taking notes from distant correspondents. That was a place where your writing was under pressure….and it made you a better newsman, this working under pressure.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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