Changes at The Oklahoman?

The Columbus Dispatch, owned by Gatehouse, is about as big as the Oklahoman.

 

The Columbus paper is designed in Austin!?!

 

The two papers I work for have been outsourced to Gatehouse for about three weeks now. It has not been a smooth transition.

 

Wow this is a huge sign that the print edition is about done. To print the newspaper in fricking Tulsa means deadlines will be amazingly early. I'm assuming this cause it's a helluva drive from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. If deadlines are say 10 p.m., to send the final page in a city as big as OKC, that's it for top-quality coverage of the colleges and Thunder. Anybody know final deadline for copy? Obviously the Oklahoman figures we have about a year maximum left of print product if they are shutting down their presses. Again, if they are designing it in Austin and printing it in Tulsa, odds are this once-fine product is about to become trash so to speak. Hard to believe the industry is about to be all online. This really helps individual journalists. For instance the Oklahoman's fine Thunder writers could put out their own Webpage and it would be way better than the Oklahoman's coverage. That's if the Thunder writers decided to start their own webpage. We need more details on deadline times.

 

The 10 a.m. meeting people are going to find out how important sports section is to a newspaper when these early deadlines prevent the Oklahoman from covering Thunder night games and the college night games. Hope OKC natives like reading the internet product cause all indications are the paper will be trash.

 

At our newspaper, all except one of our paginators are also reporters (and the one is on retirement's doorstep).

Hate to say it because of others' situations, but in our case, farming out the pagination would lighten our load considerably without significant job loss.

 

What is the contingency plan is if there is an Internet outage or there's a power blackout that prevents the design hub from transmitting the pages to the press?

 

Same as what happens now with a lot of papers whose presses are offsite. Even a lot of papers that have their own presses have them in the suburbs. And pages are sent electronically even within a building. Electronic page transmittal is pretty common.

 

The Oklahoman has been printed off-site since they moved downtown last year. So yeah, same contingency plan I'm guessing.

 

Yeah, I know that's common. My old gig had an off-site press. But it was just a few miles away. If a thunderstorm knocked out the power at our office or the T1 lines were down, we could load up the pages on a hard drive and manually take them down to the press. We had to do it a couple of times over the years. That's not so easy when the press is 90 minutes away.

 

Bosses are willing to take that chance to save a few bucks, it would seem. They're certainly willing to move deadlines up, which has an immediate and continuing effect on the product.

 

I wonder how many newspapers exist as separate entities five years after they start publishing at the same plant as another paper. I think once printing is combined that the owners start to dream about the savings that exist from combining desks.

And by my unofficial and incomplete count San Diego (printed in LA), Cincinnati (printed in Columbus), New Orleans (printed in Mobile) and Oklahoma City (soon to be printed Tulsa) are produced at least 100 miles from the city named on their masthead.

Also, Phillip Anschultz owns both OKC and Colorado Springs. I wonder if Colorado Springs is going to undergo the same treatment. Publishing moves to Denver and design to Gatehouse.