The Troy Record

*1/25/08
It's recently been brought to my attention that some readers misconstrued parts of this blog entry. Please understand that I, in no way, meant to imply that I hold the Troy Record in higher regard than my own newspaper, The Saratogian. I've only read The Record once or twice, and have still not really met anyone who works there. I'm in no position to judge, and given that I work tirelessly for The Saratogian, it would be foolish for me to even harbor such a thought.

The point of Tuesday's post was to express how much I enjoyed seeing a different newspaper, that was at once similar (same computer system, same structure), and so different to the one at which I work. In referring to the Saratogian as a sickly twin, I meant only to refer to the fact that we have no printing press at our facility. Perhaps it was a bad analogy, but I certainly never intended it as a reference to our editorial capabilities or our stature among our various communities. Again, I would have no basis to make that judgment. All that I really know is that Troy is a long drive from lovely Saratoga Springs, and that at 8 p.m. I had to walk for 20 minutes to find an egg roll. Please accept my apologies if you were one of the people who misconstrued this post.

Blogs are not unlike newspapers in that it isn't possible to edit the finished product once it's published. Actually, it is possible, but it's generally not considered ethical to do so, and as such, I am not going to change the substance of this post. Instead, I will hope that this clarification calms anyone unhappy with my words.

The Record's Ad Department: Just like the Daily Planet.
Long before Woodward and Bernstein,
Clark Kent was the original sexy journalist.

Here's something that I've been hinting at for a couple weeks but haven't actually blogged about yet. A couple weeks ago, when I was filling in on the night desk, our computer system crashed. It was quickly deemed a total loss, and not likely to be recovered that night. As they say, you can't stop the presses, so myself and Paul, the night editor, and the entire sports department, loaded into our vehicles and took off for the Troy Record, The Saratogian's sister paper.

Troy is a post-industrial city about 30 minutes south of Saratoga, and the Record is it's daily paper. While The Saratogian is a broadsheet, The Record is a tabloid, and strives to live up to that identity. Although the added commute time was a pain in the ass, the experience of seeing another newspaper was well worth the trip.

The press.
You can see paper being fed into the giant apparatus
The machine is about 35 feet tall.

The relationship between the two papers is that of conjoined twins. The Record is without a doubt the stronger of the two, while The Saratogian is a sickly sibling, using its sister's heart to stay alive. I say that mostly because the two paper have shared one printing press since they were both acquired by The Journal Register Company some years ago. When that acquisition took place, one of the first things JRC did was to fire the Saratogian's entire press room, and sell the equipment. Henceforth, they decreed, the paper would be printed at The Record in Troy.

And it was so. We at the Saratogian can work as hard as we like, but we will never had a paper without the press in Troy. This was especially true on the night in question.

In addition to their very own printing press, Troy also has a wonderful facility. Their three-story building, which sits on an entire city block, could swallow our two-story building whole. One entire floor of their building is given to the newsroom and ad-sales department. Fully half of the floor is taken up by an expansive newsroom, that instantly struck me as the most perfectly archetypal newsroom I had ever seen. Desks in small clusters were spread out across a massive room. The sports department was on one end, the news department at the other end, with the composing people in the middle.

Daily Bugle
Nexus of Information
The newsroom at The Record

The photographers had a room off to the side, and the editors had their offices in glass-fronted offices that looked out into the room. I felt a romantic rush of excitement to go run around town with my reporter's pad and pen, and then come back to this haven to tap my stories into a typewriter. It was thrilling just to be in this room; a room that conveyed nexus of information. I love my office at the Saratogian, but it doesn't even begin to hold a candle to the facility in Troy. It speaks volumes of the resources they have there that our entire staff as able to pile into the Newsroom with The Record's entire staff, and there was still room to spare.

And then there was the press. I've always been a sucker for big, shiny machines, and short of a cruise ship, they don't come much bigger or shinier than The Record's press. Several windows in the Newsroom looked out into the press room, and after I'd finished my work, and was waiting for my ride to finish his, I spent a gleeful half-hour pressing my nose against the glass, and watching the big machine whir and clank as its operators got it warmed up for the night's printing. I would have loved to have stuck around long enough to get a copy of our paper literally hot off the press, but we didn't wait that long. And it's probably just as well, since I might never have left if that had happened.

Another view of the press
You can see dummied pages of The Saratogain on the control panel
I could have watched the machine all night.