YOU know you’re being perceived as ‘legacy press’ – that horrible, inaccurate phrase – when you arrive to your workplace for the weekend to find you have no designated area, no desk, no chair, no proper wifi, and you are left looking up at the broadcast media, secure behind safety barriers in a cosy corner, with plenty of space to move about in comfort.
BY SIOBHÁN CRONIN EDITOR
This was the situation facing The Southern Star’s six-strong media team on Saturday.
We should have known all was not going to run smoothly when the doors to the Mallow GAA Complex remained firmly shut until exactly 9am – box opening time – so when we eventually got into the chilly hall, we almost missed those crucial photographs of the boxes being opened for the tallyfolk.
And imagine our surprise to find the national broadcast media already set up and working away in a corner, with a bird’s eye view over proceedings? ‘Where’s the press area?’ we asked, but were met with blank stares.
It seems when the Cork South West count was relocated from Clonakilty’s Community Hall for the first time in decades, nobody expected the West Cork press to turn up too.
But needs must – so myself and reporter Jackie Keogh went about identifying a wall space beside a power socket, locating a table and chairs in a darkened hallway, and setting up our station from where we immediately began reporting minute-by-minute on the goings-on in the two constituencies we were covering from Mallow.
We were soon ready to ‘broadcast’ to the world on southernstar.ie with tally updates, videos and photographs – producing even more ‘content’ than our ‘broadcast’ colleagues, on an hourly basis.
The sketchy wifi proved too challenging for us – so we all reverted to ‘hot-spotting’ from our phones to keep the laptops online.
But such technology needs power – and we crossed our fingers that the one wall socket within reach would keep all our laptops and phones juiced up for the duration. And with so few sockets in the hall, we allowed the public to piggyback on our multi-plugs to charge their phones.
All was well until a massive bang below our table revealed a cheap phone charger had exploded, leaving just the plug cover behind, and scattering pieces of plastic all around the floor under us.
It could have been quite dangerous as one observer said they’d seen a ‘flame’ under the desk. Minutes later, we realised the wall socket had blown and we had to move lock, stock and barrel to another location and beg – with the help of a kind negotiator from the Social Democrats (a skill which may well come into play nationally soon enough!) – to piggyback on someone else’s power source.
We also had to offer our apologies to the Social Democrats’ desk which had also been using the same wall sockets and were now bereft of power, too.
There was some brief amusement when heavy rain created a leak onto the hall floor – until we realised that if that happened over our heads we might finally lose the (power) plot! But the roof remained dry above us – though the view up there did provide our deputy editor Martin with some entertainment during a lull around 2am, when he started counting the sliotars trapped behind the ceiling nets abve us.
The fact we were so far from home no doubt influenced the decision to keep the Cork South West count going into the wee small hours, but there were many small children by now exhausted and resorting to playing loud video games on phones in a bid to keep them from total meltdown while their parents waited for the final results.
By 10pm pizzas were being delivered on rotation, with not much else on offer.
In a nutshell, whatever about the inconvenience of travelling through several other constituencies to reach Cork South West’s ‘new’ count centre, the actual quality of the facility makes it far from suitable for reporters – an intrinsic part of the democratic process.
There was talk of a ‘room upstairs’ we could use but, oddly, reporters need to be in the centre of the action in order to, ahem, report!
In 2016, we wrote about the poor wifi in Clonakilty, but were thrilled to find a satellite link there for the local election count last June.
The Clon hall may have been draughty but we had access to tea-making facilities, a room with plenty of power sockets which was also convenient to the count, and it kept us safe from an increasingly argumentative public.
We also had indoor toilets (it was portaloos in a darkened car park in Mallow), access to a whole town of food and a great atmosphere.
Last weekend, there were practically no West Cork people in Mallow, apart from those directly connected to candidates or tallying, leaving the ‘craic’ of a late night count as flat as the floor of the unwelcoming hall.
We never thought we’d say this, but … Come back Clonakilty!
All is definitely forgiven!
