Fire, clowns, a new sign and a blood drive

It’s just a typical month in the life of a daily newspaper.

3:03 PM Friday, June 26, 2009

Times are tough everywhere, including in the newspaper business, but at least I can say that life is never dull at the Springfield News-Sun.

How so? Let’s see. Where to start? Gee, there are so many choices.

Our chief photographer catching fire on assignment? Our penny-pinching building maintenance supervisor saving a few bucks by personally painting a SpringfieldNewsSun.com sign on the building — instead of hiring a pro to do it — 35 feet in the air? News coverage of a funeral for a clown that generated a half-million page views on our Web site? Oh, heck, let’s start with the clowns.

• Clowns: Who knew? SpringfieldNewsSun.com was poised to set a record for monthly page-view traffic on the last Friday of May and had a shot at topping an unthinkable 4 million views if we had a strong final two days. Then Chief Photographer Marshall Gorby shot a small photo gallery of men dressed as clowns acting as pallbearers at a funeral for one of their own. That gallery alone generated more than 400,000 page views over the weekend, and another 100,000 or so over the following days.

Saturday, May 30, marked the highest day ever for SpringfieldNewsSun.com page views at 408,000. When all the dust settled, our Web site had 4.521 million page views for the month, far north of the previous record of 3.2 million.

• Fiery photographer: Every year there’s a big flag-retirement event in New Carlisle where veterans’ organizations stage a solemn Flag Day ceremony where they respectfully burn hundreds of worn-out American flags. Marshall Gorby was there, of course, taking pictures and shooting video.

While videotaping, he heard shouts that someone had caught on fire. He panned around to try to capture the scene on camera, and then realized he was the subject of their concern. A small piece of burning flag had floated near him, and he stepped on it without realizing it. Soon, the hems of his jeans were singed and the rubber soles of his shoes were beginning to melt. Organizers of the event quickly turned a hose on him. No real damage was done, except to Marshall’s ego.

• High-level sign painting: Several employees suggested not long ago that we paint SpringfieldNewsSun.com on the back of our building underneath the Springfield News-Sun sign. It sounded like a great idea, and building supervisor Jerry Maurer — who oversees maintenance of our beautiful old building with fierce pride — was tasked with finding out how much a sign painter might want for the job. He claimed he had trouble finding anybody interested in giving us a quote. Then he told me: “Heck, I can do that myself.”

He went to a local company that prints large banners and for $450 got a fabric sign that was 35 feet long, 54 inches high and in letters 29 inches tall spelled out SpringfieldNewsSun.com. Jerry then carefully cut out the letters to create a sort of template (saving $200 that the banner company would have charged). He used the lift we already had rented for window cleaning and attached the template to the building with duct tape (what else?). Then he used about $50 worth of black paint to paint the letters, and finished the job by peeling off the template and doing a bit of touch up. It took the better part of a Saturday, and looks great for a total price tag of about $500.

• Community involvement: Like a lot of businesses, we have fewer people working for us than in the past. Because of that, we’ve found it more challenging to find the bodies needed to effectively pull off some kinds of volunteer events. Then Jim Bebbington, our managing editor, had an idea: Team up and collaborate with our neighbors at the downtown intersection of Limestone and North streets. The result is the Four Corners Association, made up of the News-Sun and our three neighbors, the post office, Clark County government and Covenant Presbyterian Church. We recently held two joint events with our partners. A blood drive held in the News-Sun parking lot netted 16 donated pints for the Community Blood Center. And a group of newsroom staffers helped with the Great American Cleanup drive downtown on Saturday, May 30.

Steve Sidlo is editor and publisher of the Springfield News-Sun.

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