The Inside Veer

How does it get better?

Robert Perea, The Fernley Reporter

Week 1 of producing the Fernley Reporter in print is over and done with, and what a rush it was to see it in PDF form before it was sent to the printer.

I write this on Wednesday night, anxiously waiting for morning, when it will be delivered and I can hold the thing in my hands. I’m trying to predict my emotions, but I guarantee they’re going to be more powerful than I’m prepared for.

No matter how long you work in this business, seeing your byline in print is a thrill every time, no matter how major or insignificant the story might be. In every newsroom I’ve ever worked, the first thing every reporter does is to turn to the page their story is on and see what the designers did with it and how it looks.

But this… This is different.

This isn’t like the first time I ever had my byline published, or the first time I ever had a front page story. It’s not like the first time I produced my own section as sports editor in Carlsbad, NM, it’s not like seeing my byline on freelance stories in papers like the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Fresno Bee, San Diego Union-Tribune or Honolulu Advertiser. It’s not even like the time one of my stories got picked up by the Los Angeles Times.

It’s like all those times at the same time.

Making it all happen was incredible. We came close to doing this a couple years ago, but things didn’t work out. Then we went from “Maybe we’ll be able to do it someday” to literally “We’re doing it now.”

Through a 31-year career in weekly newspapers, I’ve had a hand in just about every aspect of producing weeklies. But in those cases, all the infrastructure was already in place, and I was just one piece of a machine.

This time, nothing was in place, and every day of the week and a half it took to produce that first edition there was some aspect of things that wasn’t set up, hadn’t been thought of, and needed to be arranged. All the things that you just automatically do every week have to be started from scratch.

The only reason it was possible was because of Rachel Dahl, Leanna Lehman, all the ladies in their Fallon office, and their whiz of a page designer, Christine Bryner. Their infrastructure from publishing the Fallon Post served as the template for this, and allowed us to turn “Can we do it?” into “It’s done” in barely a little over a week, things that would have otherwise taken several weeks to get set up.

Now, we get to do it over and over again, week after week.

But that’s not just the challenge in front of us, it’s the carrot at the end of the stick too.

Seeing your byline in print never gets old. Seeing it in print in a newspaper that you and your friends built from scratch? How can it get better than that?