Dueling Timelines
I’m going to go ahead and tell you: Our first story below is not entirely accurate.
Over the last few years, my team and I have transitioned our timelines to be able to do in-depth, quality work while meeting deadline. A small staff, we would work weeks, sometimes months, in advance of when that information was set to publish.
In the early days of the pandemic, those timelines became virtually unmanageable. With information changing day by day, sometimes minute by minute, we reframed our workflow to be more in line with the most recent updates, adding the caveat “as of press time.”
After we settled into “the new normal,” however, things slowed down, both for the nation and my staff. For a good six to eight months, things felt almost routine. I didn’t worry as much about what we were writing being invalidated by the time it published.
Several weeks ago, as we were sending our May Travel Issue to the press – the same magazine issue we were working on when COVID-19 first struck Hamilton County a year ago – I had a conversation with one of my colleagues. “This feels like the early days,” we both agreed. With vaccine availability beginning to rocket past the expected trajectory, things were again beginning to change rapidly.
Last week, I was able to buy tickets to my first major concert in over a year. In May, I’ll be seeing Billy Strings at Bonnaroo Farm, which is not 100% in line with what we posited in our first story below, though it does still offer some insight into how things may ultimately shift in the music world in a broader sense.
I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.
– Jennifer Bardoner, editor