Dave Greiling

Two journalists recently joined the Standard-Examiner staff.

Ben Zack, a photojournalist, started last week. He is a child of the west, growing up in Spokane, Wash., where his father worked for the U.S. Forest Service.

After high school, Ben attended Northern Arizona University for a year, then spent six years in a variety of other pursuits, including working for AmeriCorps in St. Louis and spending a season as a wildland firefighter in Oregon.

Sometimes I think about the good old days.

Reynaldo Leal may be considered a jack of all journalism trades, but his first love is photography.

One of the more interesting places for me in the newsroom is an unassuming bulletin board.

In the not-so-old-days, newspaper production problems revolved around machines and mechanical breakdowns.

Consider this column as notes from the (election) battlefield.

• I wrapped up my part of the election coverage early Wednesday morning. All the local stories were filed and edited, the local election results lists were complete, and everything was well in hand.

It was the end of a long campaign for everybody, and honestly, I looked forward to no more phone calls from election pollsters and watching TV without being bombarded by ads of Mitt Romney telling me how he had “watched” Mia Love run her small Utah city as mayor and we all needed her in Washington because of the bang-up job she did. To be fair, and so the Republicans don’t yell at me, I was just as tired of Jim Matheson’s ads featuring Republicans from all walks of life voicing their support for the veteran congressman.

My relief lasted only as long as it took to make a last check of the wires. It all came crashing down when the first thing that popped up was a Washington Post story, speculating on whether Vice President Joe Biden might run for president in 2016.