Fridays are the happiest of the five typical work days for most folks. Less so in a newspaper newsroom, where Fridays come attached to Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.
Many stories written for the weekend are features or stories advancing something that will occur in the following week. There are, of course, the weekend events, accidents, etc. that are covered as they occur, but since most of the reporting staff works weekdays (when their sources are more likely to be available), a lot of content has to be prepared prior to the weekend.
That means on Fridays reporters are often working on multiple stories and editors are reading stories for three days’ worth of newspapers. And then there’s the holiday weekends like last week — when the advance preparation stretches out to four days.
Fridays fortunately tend to be busy news days, probably due to human nature, which causes us all to wrap up our business at week’s end. Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe newsrooms aren’t the only places that get hectic on Fridays.
Maybe we all should change the acronym to TGIFE — Thank God It’s Friday Evening.
