Scoop Provides Strong News Peg

By Charles Crumpley
November 10, 2004 09:33 AM

A nice story broke for us on Tuesday. But it forced us to rethink our plans for a couple weeks out.

Here's what happened: Our real estate writer, Greg Thomas, got a scoop that an empty building not far from the French Quarter is about to be sold to a developer who plans to convert it into condominiums. The building is something of a landmark because it once housed a grand old local department store. Also, that part of town has been the source of some civic hand-wringing because it is a conspicuous, but rundown, area. So the developer's plan was pretty big news.

Greg produced a story about the condo conversion for Wednesday's Money section. But it occurred to him that it would be good to go into overdrive and do a follow-up story for Sunday. He's been saving string for a story about the proliferation of condo projects lately, and now he's got a strong news peg.

That caused us to change plans on our Sunday story, not long before the Sunday planning meeting that we hold on Tuesday afternoons. In the planning meeting, the reporter who's producing the Sunday story meets with editors from the Money section, a photo editor, the graphics editor, the page designer, the design director and an illustrator. We spend about 10 minutes discussing the story and about 15 or 20 minutes tossing around ideas about how best to illustrate it.

Since we already had a Sunday story in the works, Kim Quillen, the assistant business editor, and I decided to hold back-to-back Sunday meetings: one for this week and one for next week. The advantage is that it gets us a week ahead.

Still, we normally would not have done that because of the disadvantage: having two reporters working on future stories, which leaves you kind of thin for the daily. However, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up, we figured we need to get ahead anyway. So we're barreling ahead on two Sunday stories at once.

Besides Greg's condo story, our centerpiece for Wednesday was about local oil company executives who spent the better part of a day learning how to de-grease geese in case of an oil spill. It included this nice line: "Fifteen years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil off the coast of Alaska, this is what it's come to: Rather than trying to pretend spills never happen, the oil industry is taking a proactive approach to dealing with their unpleasant effects." The story is by Stewart Yerton, who covers the oil and gas industry as a part-time beat.

Rounding out our cover: an earnings report from a big local company, a wire story about dropping crude oil prices (the oil industry is still pretty big here) and a wire precede of the Federal Reserve meeting.

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