Friday Citizen to be printed tomorrow....

So much for that blogging experiment!
As noon approached, we here on staff at the Citizen turned to lunch hour. It's a good hour...I like it. If you've ambled upon our offices at 8970 Elk Grove Blvd. between noon and 1 p.m., you're likely to find us in the midst of a tasty lunch.
Our staff - like all workers everywhere - needs their afternoon calories. We - usually Keith Gebers, June, Mary Lewis, Jon tucked into the brick-walled sports office but within earshot, Keri our photo editor; myself still corresponding with Dustin; and anyone else who'd like to join - eat lunch and take our time.
After lunch, we kicked back into gear with getting the Friday edition of the Citizen out and done. Dustin upped his call frequency and we began to finalize pages.
At 2 p.m., our Publisher, David Herburger, had called a staff meeting. We, like all newspapers everywhere, try to have staff meetings regularly. "Regularly" is a loosely defined word in the newspaper business. Sometimes it means once a month, other times once a week, and sometimes it means daily. If you have an editor who is on top of everything (at a daily newspaper), you may have two meetings a day or more.
We had not had a staff meeting in a while, at least six weeks. With a lot of turnover on the staff and wildly varying work schedules, it became hard to coordinate everyone on the same day and time for a meeting. Summer is a busy time around the Citizen, when we have not only our two weekly editions, but also a special home and garden section; the Fourth of July special insert; and our tab on the Strauss Festival.
Cameron Macdonald and I had a brief misunderstanding after the meeting I am glad we caught.
I wrote an article on Jose Romero, a candidate for city council in District 1. As Cameron edited the story I wrote about Romero....Cameron noticed some things and advised me to change two or three sections in the article; I said, 'OK,' and thought Cameron changed them. I asked him if he was done, and he said, 'Yes,' and I transmitted the story to Galt where it would be placed on our page for printing Thursday.
But, we had a problem, Houston.
It - what was sent to Galt - was a story with Cameron's notes still written in bold (no changes). Fortunately, Cameron mentioned he'd written notes on the story when I'd thought he'd changed the text. We called Dustin and had him pull the story (which had Cameron's notes visible in bold) and replaced it with the version without notations included. Whew....

We worked on the paper until about 4:50 p.m., when Dustin idicated he was almost finished. Tomorrow, Mary Lewis will proof-read the paper before it is printed and sent to subscribers.

On most days, we at the Citizen try to keep as busy as possible covering everything pertinent to Elk Grove. When I say "pertinent," I mean everything. Everything life throws our way - it is pertinent to the rest of our readership and the greater society.

Our goal at the Citizen is to bring our readers and the citizens of Elk Grove the pertinent and important news to them in an accurate, factual, truthful, unbiased, well written and researched manner. We on the Citizen staff try to gauge the cultural, political, and popular pulse of Elk Grove and manage our coverage based on our resources. We will also be keeping an eye on the wide variety of other people, things, and issues in our town which don't usually merit attention from the traditional media.
We welcome you on this journey and ask you to take part by sending us story ideas, personal experiences, news video and audio and anything else you find interesting.

Thanks,
JF