How Did That Happen?

Tonight is possibly the flukiest night I've ever spent at Spectator.
Ever since hearing about fliers going up on Barnard's campus touting a Town Hall regarding the banning of laptops from classrooms, we had been planning for one of tonight's front page stories to be on the meeting, which we, being journalists, were hoping would be controversial, heated, and generally exciting. Having heard rumblings around campus all week and after opinion published an op-ed from the pointgirl on the SGA, we even wrote a preview of the Town Hall which touched on the background of the issue, a rare step we take to show our belief that a story is particularly newsworthy. (To the best of my recollection, the only other preview we have run this year was in preparation of the Columbia Coalition Against the War's Day of Action. )
At about 10:30, more than two hours after the town hall had ended, we were beginning to get concerned about where the article was, so we called the writer, and, after she didn't pick up, the deputy editor who informed us that the person we thought was writing the article actually wasn't. So we called the person she thought was writing it, who pointed to the first person. Meanwhile, a fourth person entered the discussion to point her finger at the second. (Are you confused yet, because we had to draw a diagram to keep it straight.) And after we had made all of our calls, we finally found that, while at one point or another four different writers had been assigned to the event, none of them had actually gone.
That was one of two stories today where we had a photographer but no reporter. At an event held by the Columbia University College Republicans, president Chris Kulawik turned reporter Laura Schreiber away at the door on the grounds that the participants in the discussion felt uncomfortable being quoted during the event.
After I argued from the office hallway (unsuccessfully) with Chris to get Laura into the event, fifteen feet away, Tom Faure couldn't figure out why he wasn't picking up his phone to answer questions about a report that we had confirmed moments before about the University refunding money to the College Republicans that they had paid towards Jim Gilchrist's Oct. 4 speech. (He would later decline to commment).
Kulawik, meanwhile, wasn't the only one picking up his phone. On any given night, Columbia University has one Public Affairs official on call to answer urgent press inquiries such as ours, but for some reason, calls and e-mails to the representative and others within the office--11 all-told--all went unanswered.
As a general rule, one late story can push a night back as much as two hours. With all three of these stories falling apart--two of them after 10:30, about four hours before our ideal PDF time--the night wasn't looking good and I was preparing for one of my latest nights of the semester.
And then, everything kind of fell into place.
After two minutes of panicking, I went into our front office where the spring class of new writers were enjoying cookies and soda at their graduation from the training period and asked if we could get a writer. Jackie Kazarian and Stephanie Turner raised their hands, I gave them a call sheet and left them to track down as many people as they could who had been at the meeting to write a story based on reaction quotes.
We struck a deal with Chris whereby Laura could collect quotes following the event -- slightly disappointing, but better than nothing.
On Tom's story, as we fretted over what to do if we didn't get a comment from Public Affairs, a source that we weren't counting on e-mailed us after midnight and confirmed the salient details of the refund, giving us a cushion on running the story.
I'm still dumbfounded by the whole experience, but praise be to the deities of PDF-Times, we put the paper to bed at 2:37, about 10 minutes behind our second-fastest time of the semester.
Off to study for the midterm in 9.5 hours. Good luck everyone!