Normally Challenging News Day Takes Welcome Smooth Turn

The Tuesday paper often is the most challenging of the week. So much effort goes into the Sunday and Monday editions, that there's little time to think about Tuesday until Monday morning. Since Monday tends to be a slow news day, especially in the business world, that's usually too late to start if you want a strong Tuesday paper.

The best way to avoid that trap is planning.

The business editors at The Oregonian start each Monday with a 9:30 a.m. meeting with photo editors and page designers to discuss what we have coming for the week. The meeting forces me to put together a tentative budget before I leave Friday night.

This week, we started Monday in uncharacteristically good shape. The past two weeks have been full of news for us, largely revolving around two events — Oregon Arena Corp.'s bankruptcy filing and Multnomah County's decision to start issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. As a result, we held some stories we had planned to run last week. So we started the week with some centerpieces in the bag - a luxury for us or just about any other business section.

Our Tuesday centerpiece will advance an antitrust trial involving Weyerhaeuser and how it competed with small alder mills. The case opens Tuesday in Portland. Previously, we planned to run it on Sunday, but instead we ran a story truth-squadding the claims Oregon Arena Corp., a Paul Allen-owned company that operates the Trail Blazers' arena, made when it filed for bankruptcy.

This didn't turn out to be a slow news day. In fact, the day fell together almost perfectly.

The Weyerhaeuser package will lead the section. Our 2nd story will be on Comcast's decision to make video-on-demand service available to all its customers in the metro area by the end of the month. Until now, only customers in two high-end suburbs had the service.

The rest of the Business cover:

• Closure of a french fry plant in eastern Oregon (the one Richard Read wrote about in his Pulitzer-winning series)

• A settlement to avert a strike at Portland General Electric.

• A story advancing an upcoming FCC meeting on spam.

Two of these stories came from other teams: The plant-closing story came from an agriculture reporter on the regional team and the spam story from one of the D.C. bureau reporters.

We also will have two business stories on Page One:

• The final day of a three-day series by Read on a high-tech executive's career odyssey as he oversaw job cuts in the United States and Japan, with the jobs ultimately landing in China.

• A breaking story on Texas Pacific's filing with the Public Utility Commission in its attempt to acquire PGE from Enron. The PGE story is the only snag to the day: It's 4:45 p.m. PST and they still haven't filed. They'll do that right at 5:00, of course.

Otherwise, the day went so smoothly I had time to meet with arts editors to discuss how to reduce errors in calendar listings. I'll spare you the details.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism