Slusher: The 'Day After' can be just as daunting as Election Day

A few post-election coverage thoughts:

• For all news outlets, Election Night is an event of particularly mixed sentiments.

It is the culmination of long months of reflection and anticipation, so we appreciate to a degree its sense of finality.

It is an incredibly exhilarating experience to cover, whether one is a reporter at a candidate's headquarters wondering what story there will be to tell and how rapidly it will have to be told, a photographer facing quite similar thoughts and demands, an editor juggling the work of several such reporters and photographers from their diverse remote locations, any staffer aiming to post updates to the Web and social media or a copy editor managing the very specific and unforgiving stream of editing, headline writing and page production that all this must flow into. So, we certainly appreciate the rushes of adrenaline.

But with them comes yet another, visceral surge of anxiety. What if I get a number wrong? What if my competitor gets this story to the Web before I do? What if I misspell a name or get a quote wrong or, and this one looms large over everything, miss the deadline that was reached over the course of months of planning and woven into a complex web of interrelated story, picture and page deadlines on which a late press start and on-time delivery of the print newspaper absolutely depend? So, we're burdened by a host of fears.

Yet, somehow it all comes together nearly every six months. And that's a testament to the professionalism and dedication of every news reporter, photographer, editor, press operator or delivery person in the company, some of whom you may know by their byline, many more of whom work in virtual anonymity.

• As singular as the experience of that breaking coverage is, it also masks the irony that Election Night is not that note of finality that we naturally expect. We have been writing and designing and reflecting and predicting and preparing for months all about this one night, but - as familiar as we may be with the routine - it always hits the pit of the stomach with special force when we confront the Day After Election Day and realize it is actually even more important and just as fraught with tactical and logistical complications. Now we have to look to the future and put the events of the previous day into the context of the days ahead. Now we have to help readers understand not just what happened but what what happened means, and to do that, we often have to rely on interviews with candidates who, for vastly different reasons, may not be as eager to talk to us as they were two days earlier.

And the deadlines are just as unrelenting. The potential for mistakes of all kinds just as real, perhaps even more acute because so many reserves were spent on the excitement of the day before. The anxieties are just as plentiful; the adrenaline ... not so much.

It's not unlike the feeling you get during a horror movie when the protagonists have vanquished all the known demons and sit in breathless and mud-caked relief as the shadow of a new monster emerges from the wallpaper behind them. With still another 30 minutes of movie left to play out.

Those are the conditions and emotions roiling for Daily Herald employees in the wake of covering an election.

• Oh, and there's always one other monster. Within weeks, petition filing will begin for the next election - and we'll be set to do it all again. This time, the cycle leads into school board and municipal elections, which will expand the exhilaration, the adrenaline, the anxieties and the efforts tenfold.

• And, finally, a thought on endorsements: I confess to some mild trepidation when it looked for a while late in the campaign as though Bruce Rauner might lose the election for governor despite getting the endorsement of nearly every newspaper in the state, including one that doesn't do endorsements. We always emphasize that endorsements have a larger purpose than merely to influence a specific outcome in an election, but that kind of rebuff would certainly have been ticklish, at least. Still, it wouldn't have been the point. We never contend that our endorsements decide an election. Tuesday's results demonstrated that people agreed with us in some cases and in some cases did not. Whichever was the case, we hope our endorsements played some role in making them smarter and more engaged voters. Who knows, perhaps the groundswell of newspaper support for Rauner energized supporters of Gov. Pat Quinn. Even if so, the process served democracy.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.