A Day in the Life: Teresa Leonard

This account was written for the MidAtlantic News Research Conference on July 18-19, 1997.

A Day in the Life
Teresa Leonard
The News & Observer News Research Department

Monday 
July 14, 1997

Monday is typically a day of meetings, and this Monday is even more
heavily scheduled than most. This afternoon we were scheduled to meet with
Cascade representatives about their Mediasphere archiving system. We had
received lots of documentation from them and from other Cascade sites, all
of which had gone into my "To Read When I Get Time" pile. Now I was down
to the wire.

I arrived a little after 9 am. My schedule varies through the week and
through the year, but I'm tending to start a little later on these summer
mornings. The exception is Wednesday when I arrive between 6:30 and 7 am
to take advantage of that quiet time and leave mid-afternoon.

I always start out by checking email and phone messages and get my
calendar set for the day. After that, I started in on preparing for this
afternoon's meeting. I had done some reading over the weekend, but there
was still plenty more to digest before 3 pm. Folks stop by my office off
and on through the morning. I take out some time to check over and sign
time cards.

At 10:30 I attend the daily news meeting. Chris Hardesty, our research
manager, always attends this meeting, but I try to go when I can to keep
up on what's going on. I especially try to go on Mondays because there
will often be administrative-type discussions in addition to the usual
news budget update and critique of the day's paper. Also, Monday is the
day I'm best prepared to contribute to and learn from the
critique because I've spent some time with the papers over the weekend.
Too often during the week, I don't get a chance to really read the paper
until that night. In fact, I often note stories that look interesting
while they're hanging on the conference room wall during this meeting.

Still trying to learn all about data funnels and natural language
processing, I continue going through the Cascade material during lunch. I
seem to go in cycles of working through lunch or going out. Often, it
seems the only time you have time to meet with someone and have their full
attention is over lunch.

At 1:30, we have a mini-meeting of NRD managers in preparation for the
newsroom managers' meeting. Colline Roberts (archive manager), Sperry
Krueger (resource manager) and Denise Jones (IQ manager) and I meet in my
office. Chris is out today. This is really just a "touch base" meeting so
that we have a chance to come together and let each other know what we're
working on. We spend most of the time today talking about preparing for
the upcoming MidAtlantic News Research Conference.

At 2 pm, we head downstairs for the newsroom managers meeting. Sperry
suggests using an online forum for some of the diversity discussions we're
having, and I announce an upcoming newsroom staff meeting where News
Research services and resources will be highlighted.

At 3 pm, I attend the Cascade meeting, along with our operations manager,
programming director, newsroom systems manager, archives manager
(Colline), photo archive manager (Peggy Simmons), and a photo editor. The
meeting runs until 6 pm.

In between meetings, I try to work on various ongoing projects. At one
point during the day, I checked the task bar on my Windows 95 screen and
saw that the following operations were going on:

1. Zmail, our electronic mail reader. I start this up first thing in the
morning and leave it running all day.

2. Netscape. Also runs all day. I refer to it for quick reference
throughout the day, as well as checking out sites I learn about from email
or other sources.

3. Telnet. I'm connected to sunsite, making updates on the conference web
pages.

4. Foxpro. I'm working on a database of N&O employees with their email
addresses, work and home telephone numbers, and departments. This will
become a searchable database on our NeRD pages (company intranet).

5. Ontime. This is my calendar software. I use it to keep up with
appointments and the never-ending todo list.

6. Netscape again. This screen holds the source code of a page I'm
stealing from for the conference pages.

7. Excel. I'm updating a spreadsheet of revenue from IQ, our fee-based
research service.

8. Access. I'm also updating the timecard database.


9. Access again. This is running an application I wrote to keep up with
invoices that come through and are sent to our business office.

I also let email interrupt me throughout the day. I'm a sucker for mail of
any kind, so I just have to open up email messages as soon as they arrive.
Today I was receiving lots of updates on the conference, including "Day in
the Life" pages that needed to be added to the web site.

There were lots of things I didn't get to, like preparing for a foxpro
class I'm teaching next week or calling the department heads I'm working
with to update a web-searchable staff database, or working on the chapters
of the new ethics policy that I'm supposed to write. Those projects will
just carry over onto tomorrow's calendar.


A Day in the Life
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Last Updated: 09/16/02
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