A special hot corner of newspaper hell

To say the past week at the Daily News has been challenging would be understatement in the extreme. It was, quite frankly, a special hot corner of newspaper hell. We have thought about this conversion, the new sections, the expanded business pages for months. We did not, however, think as carefully as we might have about pulling this off without the 12 new staffers in our pre-crisis budget or the implications of election day in America. It was also only at the very last moment that I decided to ask the staff if they would mind terribly if we did much of this upside down.

I cancelled holidays. I imposed overtime with recompense only a vague promise. A rotation system to give half the team alternative Sundays with their families was suspended for the duration of battle. I changed job descriptions on a whim and even lost my temper once. Well, maybe twice.

In some cases, the strains of a journalistic perfect storm were met with resistance, in some cases with resignation. But in most cases, the reaction of the Daily News team was grace. If you think about it, grace is actually a little-used word in the English language; perhaps because it is such a rare virtue.

The search for analogies is not easy. The scene from the Tom Hanks movie “Apollo 13,” when a team in Houston assembles in an anteroom to devise an ad hoc “get ‘em back to Earth” strategy with the only the tools available to the them in outer space: some hosing, plastic wrap torn from manuals, the innards of a flashlight. If you think I exaggerate, the employees of the Daily News are my witness.

Just a few images that return to my mind on this Friday:

My tireless assistant Güler Turuncoğlu huddled in a corner with copy desk chief, Daniel Clifford, going over the printouts of a columnist after the pipes of our translation capacity burst and Güler threw herself into the rescue operation.

Foreign editor Cihan Çelik grabbing the edge of a closing elevator door with one hand while reaching with the other arm to yank me back into the corridor. “I just discovered the column we got for the Horizons page on Obama was written before the election and I have got 10 minutes before we have to move Page 6 and Page 7 to the press.”

“Do we have any alternatives ready?” I asked in less polite language. “No,” came the answer. “Then drop an explainer into the editor’s note,” I said. Cihan’s spin on his heels and sprint back to the newsroom is an image that will long remain vivid in my mind.

While it may have been newspaper hell in many respects, there was also many an angel who arrived just when we least expected it. One was Necdet Doğan, a managing editor at Hürriyet, our Turkish language “mother ship,” or, if you allow me to toy with my analogy, our “Houston.” When it was becoming clear in the waning hours of an afternoon that our ambitious new “Metronome” section was running preciously low on stories, Necdet busted open a couple of secret corners in Hürriyet’s own electronic stores of news from the paper’s municipal reporting team. Necdet saved the day on Page 4 not once, but twice.

Readers, of course, never noticed that vast swathes of our editorial pages this past week were edited in Antalya by bureau chief Betül Çal. They cannot know our joy early in the week at the discovery that Sevda Yüzbaşıoğlu at our “sister paper” Referans speaks – and writes – English with native fluency. That one of our lead business stories this week was written by old Reuters hand İrem Köker, managing editor for Hürriyet.com.tr, is something we can only acknowledge after the fact.

So much to say. So little space. These are things that perhaps readers cannot really know.

But what the reporters, editors, page secretaries and graphic artists of the Daily News cannot know is the depth of their editor’s pride as he writes a column on their work of the past week. Just before sitting down to write at a coffee shop, I sent an SMS to managing editors Barçın Yınanç and Taylan Bilgiç telling them that their teams are, pound-for-pound, the finest news operation on Earth. I meant it.Thanks for getting us back to Earth this week from the outer reaches of newspaper hell. In a word, this is grace.

(David Judson is the Editor-in-Chief of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review)