A new day begins with Cigar staff putting paper to bed

At midnight, when April 19 turns into April 20, Cigar News Editor Christopher Barrett sits hunched in front of a computer going through a news story line by line. He is checking for grammatical errors before reading it through again for continuity.

News Editor Christopher Barrett and Annie-Laurie Hogan concentrate on making Hogan's story as good as possible.

Sitting next to him is Annie-Laurie Hogan, who wrote the story that Barrett is reading. In her lap is an AP Stylebook and she flips through it whenever Barrett has a question.

This is crunch time in The Good Five Cent Cigar office, located in Room 125 of the Memorial Union. By now, the office is mostly quiet, aside from the buzz of six computers and Barrett's questions about Hogan's event, a conference that happened directly upstairs and ended about an hour earlier.

Down a short hallway, in Room 129 -- the production room, where the newspaper is designed four nights a week -- is an entirely different atmosphere.

Production Manager Allison Traver is laughing wildly and pretending to be pushed out of the door by rolling around in an old yellow office chair. She is entertaining herself while there is no work to do, and several minutes earlier she had a laughing fit, which brought her out of her chair and onto the floor.

Most of the newspaper copy is already placed on the pages where it will appear in a few hours. Editor-in-Chief Robert Hanson and I are reading through printed versions of each page, checking for errors missed on the computer.

Just after midnight, production manager Allison Traver stands up during a laughing fit.

Almost an hour later, though, Traver has settled down and is sitting calmly in front of the production computer and looking through clothing Web sites. "Is Annie's story done?" she asks. "It's almost one o'clock and I want to go home."

Barrett finishes editing the story soon after and comes into the production room to help set up the Cigar Web site for the morning. In the other room, where he had edited Hogan's story, all the computer screens are dark and it is even quieter than before.

The Union has been locked for an hour and the hallways are dark.

The newspaper is finished a few minutes after 2 a.m. and Hanson locks all the doors and sets an alarm.

By the time we leave through the back exit at 2:15 a.m., the campus is quiet. All the parking lots are empty, and while I drop Barrett and Traver off at their dorms, there are no other cars on Butterfield Road.

-- Kevin Shalvey