Spent the day covered in newsprint:

Now comes the time of year when stories must be submitted for contests and other notable honors. This is a multiple-day process that will stretch into next week, includes solving Byzantine riddles and parsing out the meaning of a rough online translation of a fortune cookie’s first draft.

There are very precise rules for news contests. It requires a great deal of precise effort, because imprecision means disqualification. It is a mess, really. But then you think of the person who must deal with the many submissions.

He is a kind man, and he welcomes dealing with these submissions and finding judges and sending out the clips and getting them returned and sorting out winners and he does it in a contest that can have about 30 categories for dozens of schools. He’s also a patient, hardworking man. And he needs these rules in place, just to make sense of it all.

So you can’t complain, really. Almost every one of the rules makes sense when you see it from his point of view. And if you heard the reasoning behind the other two or three rules you’d probably think, “Yeah, well, that figures too.”

Which doesn’t exactly make the entire process fun, but it is an important one. And, as I said, will stretch into next week.

Busy day otherwise. Jefferson County voted to file for bankruptcy, the largest municipal failure in the history of the United States. Here’s a fine timeline on the issue from August. It saddens me to read that. This story has been going on my entire adult life.

Indeed, it was one of the first stories I ever reported on the radio. And even back then it seemed like this would go on forever. More than a decade later, they’ve avoided the bankruptcy for as long as possible.

And so here’s the next story, the numb and numbly titled Now What?

Speaking of the radio, I returned to the old format for about five minutes this evening. Ingram Smith, sitting in for Chuck Oliver, asked all the right questions about a football game coming up this weekend. I surely gave all the wrong answers. The final conclusion: if the ball bounces the right way the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry will have a close finish.

Speaking of football and old and tradition and finishing … Here’s the historic Penn State press conference from this evening. I especially like when the students in the room started asking questions.

That will be around water coolers for a good long while.