Newsroom Election Prep; and No, Mike, We can’t call them Monkeys
Tackling the most important news nobody cares about.
For the life of me, I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen a human’s eyes comically large, except for that time I was sitting across the desk from our Managing Editor and explaining to him that, no, we wouldn’t be able to get real-time access to voting results the night before the election.
“What if we send in the monkeys?”
“Not even if we send them in. And they’re called reporters,”
“They hit keyboards all day, they’re monkeys,”
“That makes no sense…”
“I need this yesterday,”
Most people say that as an exaggeration for effect, but given my experiences with him, I was starting to wonder. He’d said he was doing research, but all I saw on his desk was the novel adaptation of Back to the Future III. Not even the good one.
“Mike, I told you we needed to work on this in April, why are you asking me for this in November?”
“Didn’t have an election in April. Had an ulcer.”
“I don’t care about your ulcer, elections don’t just surprise us.”
“This one did. Didn’t seem important.”
“It’s the Presidential.”
“Happens ever couple of years.”
“Four, Mike, every four years. It’s like a law, or something.”
He slammed his hand down, Back to the Future went flying, and he nearly slipped out of his chair, “Damn it, Travis, we need this and we need it now!”
“Why?”
“We’ll get scooped!”
“By who, exactly? Our competition has as shitty of a response to elections as we do, frankly I’ll be excited if we get anything out, let alone results the night of. Shit, just throw a guess out and we’ve got a 50/50 chance of being right.”
“That’s genius!”
“No, that was a joke, but given the level of effort I’ve seen to date, I can see how you might get confused.”
He didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, so I went on, “We have a website, we can have people get results, just not in real time. Like we do every year. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Okay!” He shouted, I could see the excitement bubbling out of him. Or maybe that was saliva. “Send in the monkeys!”
“Mike, honestly, they’re going to call HR in here…”