The mistakes I will not repeat in the 2020 election

There are many mistakes journalists made in the 2016 election. I will never forget the feeling of laying half asleep in a hotel that night in a coverage region where all counties went to Donald Trump. I had the election results on TV as I was trying to get a few hours of sleep before having to produce the flagship 5:30 p.m. newscast the next day. There was no sleeping at some point after midnight.

The polls were wrong. And journalists have done a lot of work to try to assess these 2020 polls more accurately. I keep reading so much polling analysis and I attended the Poytner seminar about how journalists can better interpret polling. But, we're still getting it wrong. Even if the polls today have Joe Biden up by 15 percent, I still suspect there is a lot going on in the non-traditional background that make those polls misleading. Trump supporters believe him on so many lies, his touting of his "real" poll numbers are likely going a long way. Additionally, we also will not know a lot of major, dirty tactics being used by not just Trump's campaign, but other disruptive forces around the world, until after the election.

One of my biggest regrets going into the 2016 election was that I was focused on hyper-local journalism in my municipality until 2 weeks before the election. I took that as a license to not follow every person in 2016. I ignored Donald Trump as a true contender until I found myself having to report on him as president-elect. I could tell you every senator and governor up and down the east coast in that year. But I hate two to four-year-long presidential election campaigns. As a result, I didn't know the difference between Ivanka Trump and Melania Trump in 2016 and I keyed one of them wrong the day he was elected. Whoops.

I won't repeat that mistake, having learned the faces of most of his publicly prominent administration officials in the last 3.5 years.

I tried to get out of news, but every job I take, I know I will be called back to handle some of this mess. Even though I took a job in IT and I consulted for awhile, I have stayed up to date on so many initiatives, laws, news stories, candidates, tweets, and other information I really wish I could ignore.

At any moment, I could end up in a newsroom and have to know the major news stories of the last decade. The days of easy jobs have been over for me for a long time.

I do love all my work. But, there are some days I just want to do something more simple with stakes that aren't this high.