In our business, Sunday is a tough day. You operate at less than one-quarter of the usual Monday to Friday staff. Most businesses are shut down as is Parliament, City Hall and -- generally speaking -- the courts.
It’s tough to find experts to interview, even when a story breaks. On the many Sundays I worked as national editor or the editor in charge, the day started with a manageable level of stress. Yes, we had a few good human interest features and an interesting foreign development, but where was the breaking national news that would hold up the flare story on the front page?
That anxiety would grow as you would fret about what the other news organizations might have. Then around 4 or 5 p.m., something would happen that you could train all of that pent-up stress on and assign your few reporters to chase.
That is the problem on many Sundays. Editors need to be creative. Then there's another type of challenge that comes on a Sunday: a very big story breaks. Once again with a small staff you have to find ways to make your front page and homepage a notch above everyone else in its journalism and design. A completely different stress takes over.
The past three Sundays have been those kind of Sundays. Yesterday, the Shafia jury returned with a guilty verdict against all three family members after 2 p.m. Court reporter Timothy Appleby had prepared a story to run online if a guilty verdict was announced. (Generally when you are dealing with an unknown such as a close election, you prepare background for stories based on many different possible outcomes).
Our two reporters on Sunday duty, Colin Freeze and Dakshana Bascaramurty, were given the assignment of framing the story in terms of how Canadian society is being called to respond to the scourge of honour killings. And often when an important story like this breaks, other reporters volunteer to come in and help on their day off.
The Sunday before that was just such an example, when we heard of a major management shuffle at RIM. The Report on Business has a very small staff most Sundays, but our staff understands we now are operating 24/7 and when something major is happening in their area they all come in: reporters and editors alike and web editors move from news to business. That’s why we had such comprehensive coverage -- because our staff is driven by their passion for news. (I was at The New York Times for a tour and meetings with their senior editors eight years ago and was told by one editor that on 9/11, many of their copy editors and reporters walked -- some for as long as four hours -- to get to the office and work on their coverage.)
Three Sundays ago, we saw the full extent of the grounding of the Costa Concordia, which crashed against a reef and rolled onto its side with deadly consequences.
So stay tuned for next Sunday to see what might happen.
Please e-mail me with any questions or comments about our journalism: publiceditor@globeandmail.com
