1. What time is your last scheduled press deadline?
2. What is the absolute latest time you can send a final chase page?
3. What news events have you failed to get in print because your press deadlines have been moved up in recent years?
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[Photo: The famously inaccurate Chicago Tribune banner headline Nov. 3, 1948, the day after incumbent President Truman beat Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey in the presidential election.]
To reprise the questions:
ReplyDelete1. What time is your last scheduled press deadline?
2. What is the absolute latest time you can send a final chase page?
3. What news events have you failed to get in print because your press deadlines have been moved up in recent years?
Might be fun to know, but the future will not be built on late sports and late breaking news making it into print. Fundamentally, print has to change and focus on telling stories and doing investigations that lead community concerns and conversations.
ReplyDeleteThis will be a fun exercise but the summary wil be moot.
The future won't be built on it, but the future may be short indeed if those things aren't present -- in particular, late sports scores, and especially late LOCAL sports. If those things aren't present, they signal to readers that the newspaper doesn't care. So why should the readers care about the newspaper?
ReplyDelete9:47 p.m....Ditto for night governmental meetings. Not the usual humdrum, but the ones that have an active following; the ones with issues of widespread concern in the community.
ReplyDeleteDon't cover those accurately and completely and you're sending a clear signal that the newspaper's concerns are not the community's.
I'd like to know how the press consolidations - the Journal News and Poughkeepsie Journal in New York have impacted deadlines.
And what impact is the Asbury Park design center going to have on all the papers in the region?
design studios won't affect deadlines.
ReplyDeleteconsolidating print sites affects deadlines. changes to distribution, mainly deals with other distributers, affects deadlines. changes to press staffing affects deadlines.
In all honesty, the idea of deadlines for advertising was also a convenient wink wink fantasy before working with the GPC forced us to delineate a cut-off point. Deadline wasn't necessarily when press started, we stopped the press more often to make advertising changes than editorial changes.
ReplyDeleteAs someone earlier alluded, with our websites we can cover the breaking news we need to cover in a timely manner when the news doesn't match our print cycle - a feature we didn't have 10 years ago.
As the original aggregator of varied sources, the print product still has a value - and though I follow our website religiously, not all of our stories are there. I still pull the paper out of the tube.
I would prefer that we follow the local local local mantra of a few years ago and ditch completely the national/world news and sports pages from USAToday - that is the news that anyone can get on the web. We should use that newshole better - for the stories no one else can give the reader. For the stories the local radio and TV swipe and read.
But as far as the design centers? I lament the day when local page designers no longer choose the wire stories to fill around local stories. They have the community knowledge to pick stories that actually mean something to my neighbors - not just a 10 inch story to fit a 10 inch hole.
Look at the newspaper in the photo for this story. Notice the web width?
ReplyDeletewow, u guys are still late. here at the soon-to-be topical dr, the copy deadline is 5 pm. yes, at the DAILY record, the deadline is 5PM.
ReplyDelete