What I miss about newspapers

It's coming up on two years since I last worked at a newspaper, and there are certain things I miss.

Copy editing for a newspaper is different than online. A newspaper is one-and-done -- if you miss something, it's often gone until tomorrow. Your story needs to fit a certain size and your headline has to as well. If the headline is more than one line, it's supposed to make sense where the lines break.

There's a certain gaming aspect in it for me. What's the fewest number of words you can take out of a story to make it fit? Once the widows are deleted, is anything else easy to remove?

(A widow is where, at the end of a paragraph, one word kicks over to the next
line.)

This past winter I was in New York for a pair of Division III games and sat next to the writer from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. He was filing on deadline for his Gannett paper, which used the same editing software we did when I was at USAT. So I was looking over his shoulder as we were trying to make his story fit the space while the copy desk back in the newsroom was writing the headline. Felt like I was back in a newsroom.

I even dreamt the other night that I was back at The Tower, which is the student newspaper at Catholic. I was a visitor, not a staffer, but just dying to edit something, anything, and I made my wishes known.

Even though online is on a perennial deadline, and there's a definite rush from that, it's just not the same feeling.