By John Lucas

Editors like a quiet life. Predictable. Regular. The gentle, rhythmic rolling of one deadline met after another is what we most desire out of our professional existence.

And we'd get it, too, if only we didn't have to actually publish a magazine.

The trouble with journalism is that it's occasionally affected by the news. This is true even at quarterlies such as On Wisconsin, where due to our deadline structure, the latest-breaking stories we can cover are several weeks old by the time the magazines arrive in readers' mailboxes. This doesn't make our decisions any easier. Whenever something IMPORTANT happens late in our production cycle, we have to decide if we're going to shake up all the work we've already done and cover the new story.

This happened twice during production of the summer 2002 issue. First, Anthony Shadid '90, a reporter for the Boston Globe, was shot and wounded while covering the Mideast conflict in Ramallah. Here was UW-Madison news: it involved a graduate playing an important role in the world. But what is more, the story enabled us to offer our readers insight into international events. Although the shooting would be old news by the time On Wisconsin hit the press, we knew that what Shadid had to say would resonate with readers long afterward. We decided this was something we had to cover in On Wisconsin. So our senior editor, Mike Penn, interviewed Shadid, and the story ran under the title "One Shot in Ramallah."

The second event that broke up our peaceful progress involved not a UW-Madison student, but one from UW-Stout: Lucas Helder. He's the alleged pipe bomber who apparently planned to use exploded mailboxes to draw a smiley face across the United States. When he was arrested in early May, it came to light that he'd sent a lengthy letter to the Badger Herald, one of UW-Madison's student newspapers.