Sometimes, you just have to wing it …
That’s the position all of us here at Kitsap A&E found ourselves in earlier this week when we scheduled cover art for the release of the summer blockbuster movie “Jurassic World,” that would feed readers in to either a review or feature — or both — inside.
We knew it would be tight. The first press run for A&E is Tuesday, and our sources for the materials we needed were vague on whether we’d get anything in time.
We didn’t.
An hour before our off-the-floor deadline, we had no review. No preview. No puff piece, no making-of sidebar, or Chris Pratt feature, or Bryce Dallas Howard retrospective. No Interview with the Dinosaur.
We had a quick staff meeting, and the assignment finally fell to me: Phony something up.
I was, after all, the logical person for the job, for three reasons: 1. I have decades of experience knowing very little about subjects that I go ahead and write about anyway; 2. Having been a sportswriter in a past life, the instruction “20 inches in 20 minutes” leaves me completely nonplussed; and 3. … who am I kiddin’? I’m the only one here.
This link:
will take you to what resulted, and what readers who get that first press run of A&E got this week. I offer it here as a curiosity, as an example of what we in the “go-with-what-you’ve got” line of work do on those occasions when we’ve got nuthin’.
In retrospect, maybe “Interview with the Dinosaur” might not have been such a bad idea …
— MM
