Column: Lessons from primary will help guide future coverage

John Boyette, Aiken Standard, S.C.
·3 min read

Jun. 18—Happy Father's Day!

Let me start by saying a special thanks to my Pops and all of the men who have influenced me through the years. That includes my late father-in-law Ray, whom I frequently quote with his colorful phrases and homespun wisdom.

I'll be celebrating with my family today, and of course we will likely watch the final round of the U.S. Open golf tournament. My dad's favorite baseball team, Cleveland, is playing my favorite team, Los Angeles, this weekend. So that will likely come up. (And yes, I know that Cleveland beat Brooklyn the only time they met in the World Series. Don't get me started on Bill Wambganss and his unassisted triple play.)

Pops seems to have a memory like an elephant, but our family also likes to keep up with current events. And there have been plenty to discuss around Aiken in recent weeks, including the recent primaries.

South Carolina voters went to the polls Tuesday, and there was a turnout of around 12% in Aiken County. Many of the races were tantamount to being elected since the winners will face no formal opposition on the November ballot.

I've been helping newsrooms cover elections for more than three decades. Even when I was in sports, some elections were an all-hands-on-deck affair. We didn't deploy all of our resources at the Aiken County Government Center on Tuesday night, but we had a good mix of reporters and editors on duty. I was stationed at the office.

Many newspapers, for a variety of reasons, forego trying to get results in the next day's printed product. Many don't have the flexibility of a late deadline to get in results. Such is the state of modern newspapers and the availability of online news 24/7.

We do have our own press and the ability to hold for a later start, but we took into consideration recent press issues and the fact that Wednesday is a big day for inserts. So we set a copy deadline a little earlier than normal in hopes that we would get some results in and put the rest online.

Polls closed at 7 p.m., and our team headed for the government center. I went home for a brief break and came back to the office around 8.

I soon got a call from our news editor, Holly Kemp. She informed me that absentee results were in but no precinct results had been posted yet. So we waited. And waited some more.

Finally, we decided to combine the stories on the four local contested races into one item and go with that.

As Matthew Christian reported in Thursday's paper, the elections office was having some technical issues. With 26 new poll clerks, that wasn't surprising. And with a county the size of Aiken, there were bound to be some glitches.

People who gathered at the government center were no doubt frustrated by the slow drip of information. At 9:41 p.m., the scvotes.org website had an update for Aiken County with partial results and we were able to get those in Wednesday's print edition. All of the candidates who were winning at that time held on when the final results came in around midnight, and we updated our stories for online.

Our headline in Wednesday's paper played it safe — no newspaper editor wants to wake up to "Dewey defeats Truman" — and we printed the paper before midnight. That allowed our night crew to get the papers ready for the carriers at a decent hour.

The experience was a good reminder that we will need to plan for a later deadline in November. Hopefully, the elections office will iron out some of its bugs. And we can all wake up to a newspaper full of meaningful, and current, results.

Thanks for reading.