We publish a daily newsletter every weekday morning at 8:30 a.m. from NewsBlues "world headquarters" near the tiny north central Florida town of Reddick (population 590). The text is written here in Florida, then uploaded via satellite to our dedicated server in Atlanta, where you are able to access it on the internet.

A typical NewsBlues newsletter contains about 1,500-2,000 words of copy...roughly the length of an in-depth magazine feature story (daily newspaper articles are only about 250 words in length). 90-percent of our text is fresh; we do very little cut-and-paste, usually only to include quotes from articles we have found. Each newsletter has 15-20 new stories.

	I drag myself out of bed about 4:30 in the morning and wander down the hallway to my office. I sip my first cup of coffee while the e-mail downloads. From the time I last check mail before going to bed (usually around 9 p.m.), I'll average about 600 messages overnight. I try to "rough read" them all by 6 a.m. and start to form an idea of how the day's newsletter will take shape.
Surly Editor's office

I've got some wonderful folks (who have been with me for years and live all around the country) who scout the morning newspapers for potential stories and send me the links via e-mail. On a typical day, they will submit about 40 story ideas.

By 7 a.m., I've worked up a rough draft, and I begin cruising the net on my own, looking for additional ideas. I try to wander off the mainstream media and focus instead on personal blogs, station websites and tips from my readers. Our cats, "The Puss" and "P-Man," wander in bleary-eyed to supervise production and swat at the keyboard.

My soft deadline is 7:30 a.m. That's when I begin to assemble the HTML pages and start looking for graphics and images to help illustrate the newsletter.

Usually about this time, my wife Mona... known to her readers as Mrs.B....rolls out of bed. (She stays up later than I.) From her office down the hall, she'll send me a new "Grammar Corner," and I'll mail her a copy of the rough text for editing. Our offices are close enough that we can actually shout to each other, but we've found that e-mail is the best way to communicate (friends think it's hilarious that we send e-mails 50 feet). Our computers are networked, and we share a satellite uplink.

Mrs. B's office

I always work right down to the hard 8:30 a.m. deadline....usually uploading the finished files to our server with just minutes to spare.

Then we go for a walk. Every morning...for at least an hour. To clear our heads. Mona carries a little shopping bag with apple-flavored treats for the neighboring livestock. She feeds the horses and the cattle and calls them all by name. You haven't lived until you've seen an Angus steer at full gallop in pursuit of his daily treat. Our dog, Ruby, hovers in the wings, ready to snap up fumbled handoffs.

We're back in the office by 10:00 a.m. and begin wading through the "reaction" mail, which often leads to newsletter corrections and updates. By 12, it's a wrap...although I continue to monitor mail throughout the day to deal with subscriber inquiries.

On Saturday, I work on our Lookers section.

Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, NewsBlues is closed.