Slusher: Election Night is our 'Super Bowl' for community service
Someone once described Election Night for newspapers as our Super Bowl.
It's the night of our Big Show. All hands on deck. Corporate vice presidents pulled into service to do the work of front-line editors. Press operators who adjust editions and start times. Newsroom editors implementing an intricate Game Plan of story lengths, deadlines, picture and story placements, online reporting, social media posting and, thank God, junk food snacking that took weeks to prepare and will require both split-second timing and last-minute flexibility to execute. Reporters clamoring for results from county clerks' offices so they can contact winners and losers at 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight, for reactions.
It is, also much like the Super Bowl, a weeklong affair, starting with prewrites and "pregame" run-throughs on Monday, the exhaustive "show" itself running late into Tuesday night, the cleanup of immediate details on Wednesday, the reflections, analyses and prognostications that trail out through the remainder of the week and into the weekend.
Alas, unlike football heroes, we will find no cheering fans applauding our every success or waiting at the exits for an autograph. Indeed, we will invariably have occasion to wonder just whether all our God fearing and truth telling did any money making. The pall that hangs over every Election Night, especially Election Nights such as this week's involving municipal and school board races, is writ large and dark in a common phrase - low voter turnout - and it's hard to imagine how such evident and profound lack of interest can translate into the audience numbers that sustain our work.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, though, they may. Or at least they help in ways that can seem contrary to the voting percentages. We know our print stories attract special interest from readers who care deeply about their candidates, their referendums and their communities. We see surges in letters to the editor. We monitor notable spikes in readership of our stories online.
These are welcome consolations. More than that, really. Reaffirmations is more like it. Election Night may not be for us the money spigot that the Super Bowl is for the NFL and broadcast television, but is a kind of grand display of skills, commitment and intensity all of us at the paper strive daily to nurture and employ. And it is a vivid reminder for each of us that our mission is our communities. Election stories may not attract the kind of attention that, say, nudes playing with kittens while blowing up fast cars would, but they do represent something more fundamentally rewarding, a commitment to our towns and our neighbors. It's our way of saying, "Don't worry. Even if, because of whatever other distractions, personal crises or compelling interests, you're not able to keep track of the political foundations of your schools and government, we will."
That may not exactly say "Super Bowl" to you. That's OK. It does for us, and we hope you find that reassuring.
Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is a deputy managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.