A couple personal factors have raised my awareness this election cycle. The Illinois junior senator, Barack Obama, has been a figure in the race from the earlies days of a long campaign. I changed jobs — while within the framework of media, I moved from video games to traditional media. Newspaper, radio, television. My colleagues are the reporters, correspondents, editors, and photographers that make of Tribune Company. I don’t write this to seem boastful. Quite the contrary, it has been my association with these people that has enriched my own personal understanding of news and politics in ways that I had not previously experienced. One of my major projects this year was to provide the essential networking support for our editorial staff during the two major political conventions.
I read the daily paper. I work for the daily paper. My colleagues I work with are kind, insightful, curious, garrulous, demanding and intelligent. And despite the particular problems — from the general state of the economy to the specific challenges of print and advertisings to the very specific challenges of reinvigorating Tribune under new management and new ideas — I feel blessed to have the opportunity to work alongside these people.
Tonight, Election Night, I am working the late shift, from the mid-afternoon to the run of press and perhaps later. I slept in before voting this morning. And I tried to anticipate what might happen tonight — to the country, to the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago and to me. Election Night is about as big as it gets for news. This is the big night. This is politics on the grand scale and the small scale both. This is a two-year campaign, to research and polls and conversations both on and off the record. That this particular election has come down to a son of Chicago and is culminating in rally of hundreds of thousands in my back yard.
Beta|Erinyes 