Well, this brightened up an otherwise dreary COVID day.
I was trying to slog through my email, which has been stacked up awhile, and I got to one of those stupid emails from Microsoft Onedrive that urge me to “Look back at your memories from this day.” Which is usually a waste of time even to glance at, but this time I glanced.
And these images from an editorial board meeting on Jan. 30, 2007, cracked me up.
That’s my friend and colleague Mike Fitts, doing his duty listening (I think) to a guest make some sort of pitch or other to us.
Sometimes these meetings were fascinating, even scintillating. But not always. Just ask Mike…
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I put that on Twitter, and Mike responded:
Actually, it was apparently a group of legislators. In one of the images from that day, I can identify one of them, and see the shoulder of another guy in a gray pin-striped suit next to him.
I went back and looked on the blog. No specific mention of this meeting, although in one post I said something about having had a lot of meetings that day.
The only contact report that day was I mentioned something about the breakfast meeting I’d had that day with Mark Shriver, son of Sargent and brother of Maria. I guess I thought if I was going to say anything about that, I might as well do it in a quick blog post. The material from a meeting with multiple legislators was likely to crop up any time in the coming months.
Which points to a couple of ways this blog failed to accomplish what I had meant for it to accomplish when I started it in 2005.
The first is that I had meant to say something about ALL meetings, to give a sense of the sweep of the day and the range of people we would talk to in shaping our views on the many issues we wrote about. Part of my overall effort to show that the things we said didn’t just spring from our brows like Minerva from Jupiter’s — or simply from our guts. Along with other things I did such as posting supporting materials, audio, video, etc. I was trying to share every dimension of the input we received, and I saw the blog, with its lack of space limitations, as the place to do it.
The problem always was, while the space was unlimited, the time was not. From the start, the brutal fact I had to deal with was that I had a more than full-time job without spending a second on a blog. Which is the main reason I was the only person at the paper blogging. Other people had more sense.
Consequently, I was more likely to write something quick and easy — like the Shriver thing — than something like a meeting with multiple legislators probably covering multiple topics. The Shriver thing would have only taken a few minutes. Summarizing the legislative meeting might have taken an hour or more. I just couldn’t do it.
Thus, the blog never came to be the kind of full portrait of an editorial page editor’s day that I wanted it to be….
But if you try sometime…