Trip not in plans this spring

The email was from my friend Bill Wilson.
“Anyone interested in sharing a cab to the hotel?” he asked.
Hotel? Taxi?
I wasn’t going anywhere more exotic than Dunkirk in the week ahead.
Then I figured it out.
Bill was headed to San Francisco to help with judging the California Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspaper Contest.
It’s a gig I’ve done so many times that I’ve lost count, and it’s both fun and exhausting.
CNPA picks up the tab for a flight to San Francisco and provides a nice hotel room just off Union Square for a few nights. It also pays for dinner and provides a small per diem that helps cover things like cable car rides.
The trade-off for all that is a few long days of hard work.
California has a ton of newspapers, and the volume of contest entries is simply staggering. To help figure out the winners, there are regional screenings of entries, during which California journalists try to identify the four or five finalists in each category and each division.
By the time the San Francisco panel gathers, it’s manageable. But it still amounts to plenty of work. Imagine a long table stacked about 20 inches high with large envelopes and newspapers and you’ll have some idea of the chore.
For the judging panel, it kind of boils down to grading papers. And any teacher will tell you how taxing that can be.
Each entry has to be read. Decisions have to be made on which one is better than the next one. And comments have to be written for every entry so that working journalists get some feedback.
It makes for a couple of long days, usually all day Sunday, all day Monday, and about half a day on Tuesday.
Since they fly you in on Saturday and fly you home on Tuesday night, it’s as much work as it is a vacation.
Still, at the end of the day, you are in San Francisco. Great restaurants, great atmosphere, and great colleagues from around the country to work with.
That’s what Bill is dealing with this week.
When I wasn’t able to help with the judging last year, due to a little side trip to Burma that popped up, I recommended Bill as my replacement.
This year, with no Burma on my horizon, it looked as if Bill and I would both be part of the panel.
But with the newsroom one person short and Ted Johnson still finding his footing as a part-time reporter for The News and Sun, I had to decline.
As to that shared taxi ride, my advice was to forget it. The cab ride from the airport will make a huge dent in your wallet.
It’s smarter and much cheaper to take BART from the airport to Market Street then walk a couple of blocks to the hotel.
If I know Bill, he’s smart enough — and cheap enough — to figure that out.[[In-content Ad]]