Week Begins with Solid Lineup

Mondays can be tough in the news business, coming off an outpouring of enterprise stories for the weekend. But not this Monday.

We try to make it a practice to know on the Thursday or Friday of the preceding week what will be the centerpiece for Tuesday. For a while, we made Tuesday the day for small-business profiles. But we no longer do so, opening up the center of the page to a news story or news feature.

We begin the week with a solid lineup: A story about a family from Mexico that has grown a restaurant business from one store to seven. Another reporter spent the end of last week developing a story on adjustable-rate vs. fixed-rate mortgages as part of our coverage of the Fed meeting starting Tuesday.

Another reporter's weekender is underway on a flurry of purchases of high-tech medical gear by area hospitals. Our standard Q&A on Mondays is already arranged, this one on an expert on worker's compensation ahead of a seminar on the subject next week in Santa Rosa.

But before plowing into the new week, how did we do over the weekend?

On Sunday, reporter Michael Coit developed a piece on how businesses are taking advantage of incentives to put in very large solar systems to generate electricity. In a state that could face another energy crisis in two years, the program is so popular that PG&E has a waiting list and has temporarily stopped making grants.

Monday's section -- which two years ago was transformed from a tech section to a look at the week ahead -- set up a key earnings report by our region's largest technology company with 2,350 employees, Agilent Technologies.

So far, it's a smooth start to the week. The morning story standup with five of seven reporters showed there's plenty in the works for the week. The morning news meeting of editors, including business, also found plenty working.

But as the day wore on, there were some surprises.

About midday, we discovered a statewide government retiree association was dropping a major hospital locally from its list of approved facilities. About 3,000 people were impacted. Another story fell through, this one on a local supermarket chain removing household items because it couldn't compete with Wal-Mart.

Then, at the editors gathering in the afternoon, a Federal Reserve meeting setup moved to Page One. A business sidebar on the growing use of adjustable-rate mortgages went out to A1 as a sidebar. A chart and box were developed as additional elements.

It's now about 7 p.m. and the editing for the day is just wrapping up. But we will have a strong page with the hospital story at the top and a centerpiece about a fast-growing Latino-owned restaurant chain. Our wire picks for the day, in consultation with the copy desk, were follow-ups on the Google IPO and record oil prices.

Not everything is about journalism, of course. There are the July and August safety messages to get out and some paperwork to do.

But we're off and running into a week that will include a lot of local news, including a key earnings report and and another Friday on local unemployment.

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