Page 10 - BusinessWest December 21, 2020

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Joan Livingston says reporters are working hard remotely, but she’s looking forward to the unique energy of a full newsroom.
Words to Live By
Greenfield Recorder Stays Locally Focused on Pandemic — and Everything Else
LBy Joseph Bednar
ate last winter, Joan Livingston and her team at the Greenfield Recorder were planning a comprehensive, multi-part series of articles marking the 100th anniversary of women gaining the
right to vote in the U.S. But, as businesses of all kinds can attest, plans made in February had a way of shifting in March.
bin region. But while the editorial focus may have changed — we at BusinessWest also remember, quite clearly, those early days of all COVID stories, all the time — the Recorder’s philosophy of hyper-local cover- age did not change.
“That has remained our focus, how those commu- nities have been impacted,” she said. “We had to shift gears pretty fast. We weren’t expecting this; no one was expecting this.”
Michael Moses, publisher of the Recorder and sev- eral other community newspapers in Western Mass. and New Hampshire, remembers closing all the build- ings on March 16 and setting up reporters, designers, salespeople, and others at home.
“At that point, everyone wanted to work remotely, so we took steps to make sure they were able to work from home,” Moses said. “Like everyone else, we didn’t have a lot of time for planning for that, but everything came together pretty well. From an IT perspective, we were already teed up with our front-end system for the news to operate from anywhere, and that flexibility certainly helped us. So it was an essentially seamless transition.”
Since then, the newspaper offices have been open to employees who need to use them, from customer-service staff to the business offices, as well as some reporters, but in general, much of the work of producing these daily and weekly publications has continued
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“We were planning a series on suffrage; it was going to run, and we stopped that immediately,” said Livingston, editor in
chief of a daily publication that covers some 30 com-
munities in Franklin County and the North Quab-
“We had to shift gears pretty fast. We weren’t expecting this; no one was expecting this.
”
10 DECEMBER 21, 2020
COVID STORIES BusinessWest
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