A tremendous amount of planning is required for election day coverage.

So let me take you behind the scenes as we prepare to cover one of the most important elections in our nation’s history.

And we’ll get to that point where we’ve published and reprinted a front-page poster in the Extra edition that some readers really wish we didn’t have.

It starts with “matter B”.

Allison Ross, our assistant managing editor for local news, came up with a comprehensive plan that she worked with other editors to get our stories moving — long before the polls opened. Dozens of reporters, photographers, editors, designers and engagement producers knew their assignments and completed their work in advance as they made arrangements on Election Day. About two-thirds of the newsroom participated in our coverage on November 5.

All this happened less than a month after a giant steel crane collapsed into our building, rendering the newsroom uninhabitable. Most of us were working from home.

Issue B arrived a week before the election. Matter B is newsroom lingo for describing the background that goes into election stories.

The newsroom gathers this material, often with three potential leads or “leads,” so they can move as quickly as possible with complete stories on a tight deadline.

It explains how stories of 750 to 1,000 words can be published just seconds after breaking news.

We spent a good part of the weekend before Nov. 5 going over our Issue B. The 12 stories we reviewed — everything from the Hillsborough County DA’s race to the presidential election — had versions of both sides winning. A third alternate top had every race too close to call. Only one version will be published eventually, of course. Much of this pre-written material would be for nothing. On election night, this dance requires careful final editing.

Just as we prepared alternate versions of each story to cover every eventuality, we constructed alternate “poster pages” that would become the front page of an “Extra” edition when we knew who the next president would be. Our assumption was that any extra pages could be finished by midnight or possibly the next morning and serve as an updated version of the e-newspaper.

On rare occasions, I have created the first special poster pages for the e-Newspaper, which eventually appeared in the physical newspaper. It happened when the Lightning won the Stanley Cup, twice, and when the Bucs won the Super Bowl. Because the news came out on days when we don’t deliver a newspaper, we reprinted the front pages later. Readers have told us they love collecting these important first pages.

Heading into Election Day 2024, this was the plan: No matter who won, we would reprint the front page of Extra if we couldn’t include the real news in an edition we delivered to our homes.

Indeed, I posted the Extra pages around 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday, November 6, after Trump was declared the winner. I scheduled the front page to appear in Sunday’s paper. I’ve heard from a few readers who complained that we didn’t treat Biden the same way in 2020.

But there is a key point of distinction. Joe Biden became the winner in 2020 four days after the election. On Saturday, November 7, he secured the necessary electoral college votes. Since we were able to put the news in the print paper, there was no need for a special reprint.

This was the first page that appeared on November 8, 2020:

I’m sure many readers kept the front page, while others couldn’t have sent it to the recycle bin faster.

That’s politics in America.

Regardless of the outcome on November 5, we were determined to publish a poster page and make it available to readers in print.

Designer Beth McCoy created two options.

You saw the Trump version that ran.

Here’s what Beth prepared if Harris won:

Should we have reserved this poster treatment just for a Harris win? You could argue that it would have been a more historic moment if the nation had elected our first female president. But it’s a big deal anyway.

Ultimately, it is our job to report the news fairly and accurately. On election day, there will always be winners as well as people unhappy with the result. This is the nature of our political system. And we will continue to document it as best we can.