RSS
A big day in Chester -- and Folcroft
Welcome to confessions of a newspaper editor.
Today is a day I’ve been waiting on for a long time.
It was last summer, July in fact, that I got my first call from a staffer with some fairly startling news out of Chester.
He explained a group of investors had been in talks with the county to build a soccer stadium along the city’s waterfront. I tried not to giggle. Or ask him if he had been drinking.
He wasn’t joking. And in very short order laid out the plan. The stadium would be built to lure a Major League Soccer franchise to the region.
I’ll believe it when I see it, I muttered to myself.
This afternoon I will see it. We all will.
Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber will stride to a microphone today at the majestic Turbine Hall in the Wharf at Rivertown and announce that the league’s 16th franchise will play its games not far away at a site literally in the shadow of the Commodore Barry Bridge.
Chester is about to become a major league city again.
This newspaper has spent no small amount of time and manpower tracking this story. There are some members of my staff who believe I am more than a bit obsessed with it.
We have been a strong booster of the project, not only of the idea of an MLS franchise coming to Chester, but of building the stadium, which includes a big chunk of public funds.
The $115 million project includes $30 million from the county and $47 million from the state. Not exactly chump change. Not everyone believes this is the correct use of public funding, nor the right way to spark economic development in depressed areas such as Chester.
But I believe it will be worth every penny.
The stadium will be the centerpiece of a $500 million development that will turn the Chester waterfront into a destination point, replete with high-end shops, restaurants and residences.
We had been hinting for about a week that the deal likely would be announced at a press conference today. Getting someone on the record to tell us that was another matter. It was for the most part all nods and winks, but no one wanted their name with it.
That changed at about 2 p.m. yesterday when the advisory on the press conference went out. We actually posted the story on our Web site, with the expected announcement, yesterday morning. Then we updated it with the official announcement.
As you might expect, I have been thinking for some time now of just how to present this story on our front page. It’s what I do. I see every story as a possible front page. I knew this was a big deal, and I know we had spent considerable time chasing it down. I wanted to be sure we gave it the proper “oomph” on our Page One.
But it’s a funny thing about news. It almost never respects how much planning you have put into a certain project. So I started to fret a bit yesterday when we first got word that two Peco workers were stranded on a pole about 150 feet over Folcroft.
I had a feeling this was going to be a good story. It was. It also had something else. It was visual. That’s something we take into consideration when we make up Page One, what kind of image we’ll be able to use with the headlines we select.
Then I heard that a Coast Guard helicopter was being dispatched from Atlantic City to snatch the two stranded workers from their lonely perch.
My graphics editor hates situations like this. He spends a lot of time and effort to take my idea and create a really stunning front page, then I tell him to tear it up and start over.
Once we saw the photos from the rescue, it really became a fairly easy decision. They were stunning. We would use the photo of one of the workers being hauled up to the copter from his perch as our lead, along with the headline “High Wire Act.”
It’s a pretty compelling front page.
We didn’t forget about the historic soccer announcement. That’s it up there in the top left corner of the page.
And we’ll be all over the announcement that Chester is a major league town again for tomorrow’s newspaper.
It’s a pretty good bet that story will dominate our front page.
Depending, of course, on what happens later today.
In this business, as I learned again yesterday, you just never know.
I guess that’s why they call it “news.”
Today is a day I’ve been waiting on for a long time.
It was last summer, July in fact, that I got my first call from a staffer with some fairly startling news out of Chester.
He explained a group of investors had been in talks with the county to build a soccer stadium along the city’s waterfront. I tried not to giggle. Or ask him if he had been drinking.
He wasn’t joking. And in very short order laid out the plan. The stadium would be built to lure a Major League Soccer franchise to the region.
I’ll believe it when I see it, I muttered to myself.
This afternoon I will see it. We all will.
Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber will stride to a microphone today at the majestic Turbine Hall in the Wharf at Rivertown and announce that the league’s 16th franchise will play its games not far away at a site literally in the shadow of the Commodore Barry Bridge.
Chester is about to become a major league city again.
This newspaper has spent no small amount of time and manpower tracking this story. There are some members of my staff who believe I am more than a bit obsessed with it.
We have been a strong booster of the project, not only of the idea of an MLS franchise coming to Chester, but of building the stadium, which includes a big chunk of public funds.
The $115 million project includes $30 million from the county and $47 million from the state. Not exactly chump change. Not everyone believes this is the correct use of public funding, nor the right way to spark economic development in depressed areas such as Chester.
But I believe it will be worth every penny.
The stadium will be the centerpiece of a $500 million development that will turn the Chester waterfront into a destination point, replete with high-end shops, restaurants and residences.
We had been hinting for about a week that the deal likely would be announced at a press conference today. Getting someone on the record to tell us that was another matter. It was for the most part all nods and winks, but no one wanted their name with it.
That changed at about 2 p.m. yesterday when the advisory on the press conference went out. We actually posted the story on our Web site, with the expected announcement, yesterday morning. Then we updated it with the official announcement.
As you might expect, I have been thinking for some time now of just how to present this story on our front page. It’s what I do. I see every story as a possible front page. I knew this was a big deal, and I know we had spent considerable time chasing it down. I wanted to be sure we gave it the proper “oomph” on our Page One.
But it’s a funny thing about news. It almost never respects how much planning you have put into a certain project. So I started to fret a bit yesterday when we first got word that two Peco workers were stranded on a pole about 150 feet over Folcroft.
I had a feeling this was going to be a good story. It was. It also had something else. It was visual. That’s something we take into consideration when we make up Page One, what kind of image we’ll be able to use with the headlines we select.
Then I heard that a Coast Guard helicopter was being dispatched from Atlantic City to snatch the two stranded workers from their lonely perch.
My graphics editor hates situations like this. He spends a lot of time and effort to take my idea and create a really stunning front page, then I tell him to tear it up and start over.
Once we saw the photos from the rescue, it really became a fairly easy decision. They were stunning. We would use the photo of one of the workers being hauled up to the copter from his perch as our lead, along with the headline “High Wire Act.”
It’s a pretty compelling front page.
We didn’t forget about the historic soccer announcement. That’s it up there in the top left corner of the page.
And we’ll be all over the announcement that Chester is a major league town again for tomorrow’s newspaper.
It’s a pretty good bet that story will dominate our front page.
Depending, of course, on what happens later today.
In this business, as I learned again yesterday, you just never know.
I guess that’s why they call it “news.”
posted by Heron's Nest at
7:33 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home