Did Wednesday's edition of your newspaper have the Presidential election final?

We went to press at (East Coast) midnight, obviously not calling the race yet in Trump's favor.

Curious how many shops extended deadlines to 2, 3 a.m.

 

Paper here went to press sometime between 10 and 11 Pacific with Trump election imminent headline. But what I was bothered by more is, local copy deadline is so early there wasn't a word about local races. Went over to the county clerk's office to see the numbers.

 

Front Pages Archive | Newseum

 

We had the (rare for our shop) foresight to extend the A1/jump page deadline to 12:30 a.m. PST (usually it's 11 p.m.). That meant we were able to swap out an older wire story for one that included a couple quotes from his victory speech. But like HanSen's shop, our local county clerk was so swamped/beleaguered by write-in votes that we only had 3 percent of local ballots counted by midnight.

On the other hand ... no one thought to print extra copies for the newsstand, so when Trump won, almost all the single-copy papers sold out in our ultra-red state (and old-fashioned) corner of the world. We had to reprint more during the day Wednesday.

 

Nope

 

Nope

 

I took a quick look at one of the most contested states, Pennsylvania, to see how the local papers played it there.

Almost none of them had the winner.
Front Pages Archive | Newseum

 

No. Final page deadline, which is usually 11:30 CT, was pushed well past midnight (and extended at least once based on the likelihood that it was all over and our pressmen being behind) and we still didn't get anything official.

 

We held until they called it and got it all in, word for word at almost 3 a.m. I was proud of an editorial decision by my paper for the first time in a long while.

 

The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale had the winner. The Palm Beach Post (which is at the mercy of the Sun Sentinel's printing facility for its deadlines) did not.

 

The paper we have home-delivered here on the East Coast had the headline "Nail-Biter", so no final result. Same for that paper's electronic edition. My previous paper didn't have the final result in print, but can hold late into the night for the e-edition, which gets distributed around 5 a.m. That front page was a blowout that Trump won.

 

I have a practical question. Can someone describe a generic timeline for printing a paper, starting with when articles are finished, how long until it's laid out, how long until papers are being printed, how long printing takes?

I ask because posters complain of deadlines being moved up when it seems like everything can be done quicker with digital technology.