As I begin to write this week’s Unorganized Territory, I am looking at a little orange post-it note on the edge of my computer screen. It says, “Column 600 words max.”
I am behind schedule and I am now at the mercy of my co-worker and friend Laurie who pastes the paper together each week.
Newspaper fans are likely saying, “Newspapers don’t paste up the paper anymore.”
They are right. It is all done digitally now. But it still requires patience and persistence to make all the pieces fit properly. Each week Laurie agonizes over the placement of ads and copy. She tries to have a nice balance of ads and editorial content. She doesn’t want a page to be ad-heavy or too light.
We all work to have hospital or health articles next to medical-oriented ads. We try to have light and cheery articles next to the restaurant and retail ads.
We strive for consistency on our pages. The “church” page, for instance, with our Spiritual Reflections columnist, obituaries, births and engagements, is always on page A5. The legal notices and the classified section are always toward the end of the B section. And our sports and school news fill the rest of B. Upcoming events can almost always be found on A14 – A15.
Readers may not be conscious of these anchoring elements. They might not recognize the subtle similarities each week, as they may have missed the secret joke in Carson’s Gitche Gitche Gumee. Our cartoonist will likely be annoyed with me for sharing his inside joke, but I’m going to give readers a hint. That way you can help keep watch to see if Carson continues to be consistent.
On the weeks that Gitche Gitche Gumee features bears—which is most of the time—there is one bear wearing Ben Franklin-style sunglasses. He is really cute, but he’s not much of a conversationalist.
If you can figure out what makes the sunglass-wearing bear different, write me a note. If I get a correct guess, I’ll send you a free subscription to the News-Herald. If I get numerous correct answers, I’ll draw one lucky person’s name for a free subscription.
But I digress, which is something else that is consistent. Unorganized Territory, for those who don’t know or who have forgotten, is named unorganized territory because that is where I live. Literally and figuratively.
I have always been an unorganized person—forgetful and easily distracted. I am always losing things—notes for articles, my cell phone (thank you Leslie Gradek for finding it last time!), earrings, my coffee cup, my shoes—you get the idea.
When my family returned to Grand Marais in 1995 after 20-plus years of wandering, we built a house just a few hundred yards away from where I grew up. And when we received our first property tax statement, I discovered that we were living in the unorganized territory of Grand Marais.
Not only am I now living (literally) in unorganized territory, it is where I spent my formative years. I cling to that as an excuse for my disordered existence. And, I claimed it for the name of my weekly column.
So what does all this have to do with the orange sticky note? Not a lot. I meant to use this space to describe the challenge of writing to fit a particular piece of our newspaper puzzle each week. That is what happens if I don’t get Unorganized Territory to designer Laurie before she has the rest of the page laid out. She sticks that sticky note on my computer and I have to be brief—or long-winded—depending on her direction.
It’s a challenge. And it’s one I can’t complain about this week because at 641 words, I’m out of room! A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Isabelle Mary Beeton
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