Stashed in a box at home, among other more eye-catching mementos, I have a brown manila envelope containing a couple of bureaucratic documents. Perhaps in a decade or two, my grandchildren will take them out and wonder what they mean. I hope they’ll have to puzzle it out, and won’t understand straight away what they are because they’ve lived through more pandemics. Not that the current one is over, as many people have been led to believe.
The documents in the box are a curfew pass from 2021, and two accompanying letters to the Commissioner of Police: one from the end of April, asking for me to be allowed out and about during the “Stay at Home” period of the next few weeks, and the other requesting similar permission during the state of emergency which came into effect in mid-May that year, when there was a curfew from 9 pm-5 am.
The commissioner was reminded in the letter that Newsday was applying for these passes because “you would appreciate that the media (are) an essential service” and because of “the necessity for credible news being communicated to the public during these challenging times.”
[caption id="attachment_1036352" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Chief photographer Jeff Mayers captures police on patrol along Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook as TT was placed under SoE. File Photo/Jeff Mayers[/caption]
The newsroom had to cope not only with the changes everyone had to make because of the covid19 pandemic – learning what we needed to do to stay safe, getting vaccinations once they became available, travelling in half-empty taxis, helping children to learn in virtual classrooms – but also doing our normal job in abnormal circumstances.
At the best of times, every day is a different news day. The paper you try to plan in the morning is usually very different from the one that’s been put together by the evening. And, more slowly, but drastically, the technology changes. There are no longer typesetters who type up stories onto column-wide strips of paper that must then be glued onto a dummy page; editors don’t have to cut stories literally by going into the subediting department with a scalpel and slicing off the ends of any strips of paper that stretch beyond the foot of the page.
Now staff can tweet news as it happens, and they have to write versions of their stories to go online as soon as possible before moving on to write for the following day’s print edition.
But a lot of the actual newsgathering has remained the same: go to press conferences and ask questions; go to the Red House and sit in the media gallery; go to someone’s home or office and interview them.
Until covid hit us, and almost everything changed.
Some things didn’t. The paper has to come out every day. Newspapering changes all the time, but that rule doesn’t. And even in a pandemic, news doesn’t only happen between 9 am and 5 pm. And gathering the news isn’t the end of it. Some stories must get into tomorrow’s paper, but others have to be selected, copy edited, headlines written, photos chosen, pages built. We brought forwa
