Behind the Headlines

It’s a fun day in a newsroom when we get to report on events people are happy and excited about. Today is one of those days.

The buzz surrounding the release of J.K. Rowling’s book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows tonight is reaching fever pitch. The Lexington Public Library reported Thursday that it had ordered 175 print and audio editions of the book, and had put more than 500 reservations on its waiting list.

The Herald-Leader has tasked six reporters and photographers with collecting stories and images from parties, bookstores and libraries all over Lexington and Georgetown. They’ll be experimenting with blogging, audio recording, digital slideshows and video production, all live in the space of about 10 hours today. Two editors in the newsroom will be compiling their work for use on a couple of different Web sites as well as the morning newspaper.

Then resident wizard Heather Chapman, and guest writers from the community, will take over blogging as she sprints through the book.

Seems like a lot over a children’s book, doesn’t it? Maybe so, but I relish the chance to experiment with new technology and ways of telling stories. This kind of effort on a light, fun story means our staff does an even better job telling the hard-hitting breaking news that comes when we least expect it.

Watch The Muggle Tongue blog starting about 5 p.m. today to see how our staffers are doing. And let us know if you like it!

Dori Hjalmarson
Assistant metro editor

Covering the Kentucky Derby is the Herald-Leader staff’s busiest and most fun time of year.  I like to call it our annual teamwork exercise.

Preparations begin in February with the formal appointment of the Derby Czar – or, Derby Queen, as we called assistant metro editor Dori Hjalmarson in honor of this year’s special Derby spectator. Dori and her assistants, night metro editor Jeff Beach and features reporter Mary Meehan, who will lead the 2008 and 2009 Derby efforts, spent weeks planning and organizing most of the non-sports coverage leading up to the Derby, as well as the 18-page special sections the day of and the day after the race.

Page designer Jeff Bowen was responsible for the elegant look of this year’s coverage, which included a dramatic preview cover closeup that had readers looking straight into the eye of Street Sense. (Did we call that one, or what?) You can download a copy from the Derby coverage page.

Sports editor Gene Abell presides over the racing coverage, and he and his team spend most of Derby week on the Churchill Downs backside.  Visuals Editor Ron Garrison, a veteran of more than 30 Derbies, and online editor Deedra Lawhead plan and oversee the photo and online coverage.   

The brains behind much of this year’s eye-popping multimedia coverage – online photos, audio slide shows, videos, panoramas and more – was photographer David Stephenson.

Many freelance photographers help us with Derby each year. Others include Dr. Ken Weaver, who with a 600mm lens captured the great image of Queen Elizabeth on page 13 of the Sunday section, and James Kenney and Tim Broekema, the leaders of Western Kentucky University’s acclaimed photojournalism program.

On Derby day, we have nearly 50 reporters, photographers, editors, picture editors and runners at the Downs to quickly capture the event and put it online and into the next day’s paper. They work from two bases: the main press box in the grandstands, just to one side of the twin spires, and the cave-like auxiliary media center near the paddock, where you see reporters Amy Wilson, left, and Cheryl Truman, in this photo.

After weeks of work, the newspaper coverage hits the home stretch between the race and 12:50 a.m. Sunday, when the finishing touches are made to the Herald-Leader’s final edition.  The copy, design and imaging staffs back in Lexington put it all together. Those 35 people also collaborate on a catchy A-1 headline that incorporates the winner’s name, which isn’t always easy. (You know those folks were rooting againt Teuflesberg.)

It’s all a lot of work – and a lot of fun. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Tom Eblen
Managing Editor

Friday brings to a close the 42-year career of staff
photographer Frank Anderson. Loyal readers of the Herald-Leader – and the
Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader before the papers combined in 1983 –
will miss his contributions to their newspaper, whether or not they knew Frank
personally.

From the mundane to the dramatic, Frank’s pictures have
reflected the lives and the passions of Central Kentuckians for more than four
decades. He began learning his craft in the early 1960s as a darkroom
technician for the late Herald photographer E. Martin Jessee. Frank became a
full-time staff photographer in 1965.

Frank has covered every conceivable newspaper assignment,
from tea parties to presidential visits, “pets of the week” to NCAA Final
Fours, coal mine disasters – and 39 Kentucky Derbies.

Frank’s favorite area of coverage was thoroughbred horses.
He covered all aspects of the horse business, from breeding to racing to a top
female jockey battling cancer. In 2003, he won the Eclipse Award in
photography, thoroughbred racing’s highest honor.

Over the years, Frank never lost his competitive spirit as a
photographer; he always wanted that big lead photo on the front page. That
spirit is one thing we’ll miss about him around the photo department.

To many of us, Frank has been much more than a fellow staff
photographer. He’s been a mentor, a colleague and a good friend. His endless supply of jokes and outrageous
stories has kept us entertained for years. We wish him well in retirement, but
we’ll miss him greatly.

A gallery of Frank’s images and a story about him are in the
Free Time section of Thursday’s newspaper.  To view a multimedia presentation of Frank’s
career go to: http://www.heraldleaderphoto.com/multimedia/frank/retires.html

Ron Garrison
Visuals Editor

I hope you have noticed that over the past year Kentucky.com has continued grow and evolve as a way we provide readers with
up-to-date news and information. This year, Kentucky.com has already enjoyed a
record 90 million page views.

Kentucky.com also offers us a way to give readers
information in formats that simply aren’t possible in print. In some cases,
that means posting the audio from an event, a press conference or a speech. It
other cases, it means posting legal documents that are simply too large to
publish in the newspaper. 

This week marks another milestone, as we move into video production. We’re starting with commentary from two of the most
familiar people on our staff – editorial cartoonist Joel Pett and sports
columnist Mark Story. 

Joel will post a video commentary on Mondays and Mark will have a commentary on Friday.
Joel’s first commentary went up earlier this week, and Mark’s will be posted Friday. Of course, Mark and Joel  will continue to appear
in the daily newspaper. The video commentary is just one more way that
Kentucky.com allows our staff to provide readers with news, information,
commentary and analysis. 

The commentaries are made in our own studio by content
producer David Robinson. They are then edited and approved in the same way that
the cartoons and columns are when they appear in the newspaper. 

Let me know what you think of them.

Mike Johnson
Deputy Managing Editor

So, you live in Scott or Woodford County. You did your civic duty and voted Tuesday. You went to bed wondering who had won the local races in your county or city. You opened your door Wednesday morning, picked up your copy of the Herald-Leader, flipped to the election results lists on pages A16 and A17, found your county and ……. N/A. That’s what you saw for races in Woodford County, Midway, Versailles, Scott County, Georgetown, Sadieville or Stamping Ground. We’ve received a few calls today from inquiring voters in these two counties, and a few others who live in counties for which we had incomplete results in the morning paper. What happened?

In a nutshell, the combination of heavy turnout, long lines, a huge ballot and new electronic voting machines combined to slow down election tallies and results Tuesday night. In some counties, this meant the results just came in a bit later than normal. In other counties, it meant results weren’t fully tabulated by election officials until Wednesday — well after the paper had gone to press. Unfortunately, Woodford and Scott counties — two counties in the Herald-Leader’s core circulation area — had major problems tabulating election returns Tuesday night. In Scott, the problem was related to difficulty combining results from a mix of old and new voting machines. In Woodford, votes were being counted by hand because of problems with voting machines. The results for these counties, and many others, weren’t ready when the first edition of the Herald-Leader hit deadline (around 11 p.m.). Our lists of county and city results were far more complete for the paper’s final edition (which hit deadline around 12:30 a.m.), but Scott and Woodford results still weren’t available by that time.

So, readers in those areas found N/A in the newspaper. We updated a voter turnout story in the paper to report the vote-counting problems in both counties. And, in a story about key races in regional counties, Herald-Leader reporters gave the latest results available for races such as Georgetown mayor.

Five or six years ago, that would have been the end of the story — and results for Woodford and Scott wouldn’t have been available until Thursday’s newspaper. Enter the web. We’ve been updating voting results on Kentucky.com throughout the day today. Many counties that were incomplete in the morning paper now have complete results online, including Scott and Woodford. At the same time, Georgetown bureau reporter Steve Lannen posted a story online about the results in the Georgetown mayor’s race in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

In Thursday’s paper, we will also update and re-publish results from many of the counties that didn’t have results in the two editions of Tuesday’s newspaper. Central Kentucky reporter Greg Kocher also will have a story following on the vote-machine problems in some counties. We strive to include the most complete election results possible the day after the vote. Sometimes circumstances beyond our control make that impossible. With Kentucky.com, we can report those election results as soon as we have them — and you don’t have to wait a full day to find out who won.

Peter Baniak
metro editor