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

Yes. Held the presses til 1 a.m.

 

For many newspapers these days, the biggest part of this equation is totally analog -- the act of driving those newspapers from a printing facility 100 miles away back to the newspaper's hometown. No way to make that go faster digitally.

 

For us there's about an hour between deadline and layout and then another 30-45 minutes between exporting and when the thing is ready to print. That's for late stuff though, and the sooner the layout people have stuff the more likely it is that the layout is actually creative and/or good.

I think it's less an issue of things moving quickly with technology and more an issue of manpower. Deadlines move up because its expensive to have people working overnight, there are fewer people on the presses or on the desk so they need more time because they're doing more volume in terms of pages, and many shops that do have printers are picking up outside print jobs to maximize the $$. That means everything has to be earlier so they have time to print all that other stuff, and if you're one of the shops that's printing outside then you're at the mercy of whenever your deal says your deadline has to be.

 

What that guy said.

 

Bingo.

Our deadline got bumped up by at least an hour two years ago because instead of printing it in the back room on our outdated press (and instead of updating said press), we now send it to a printer 100 miles away. In order for papers to get back to the office in time to get them on the readers' doorsteps at the same time as always, deadlines were affected.

 

California papers too. All the McClatchy papers in the Central Valley printed in Sacramento and Media News papers in Monterey and Santa Cruz printing in San Jose, for a couple of examples.

 

When I was at a small shop in the UP and our press was in the basement, the deadline for my Friday night pages was 1 a.m. ET, but my bosses understood that to mean that the press would start at that time. For that reason, I needed to be sent out by about 10 till, since it takes a couple minutes for the Computer-to-Plate machine to make the plate (or four plates if it's color). Heat is a big part of the process, so it takes less time to do if the pages come in quickly because the machine is still hot. Even then, it takes 2-3 minutes per plate.

Assuming the pressmen were right there at the machine and not taking smoke breaks, preparing and putting those plates on the press takes another minute or so each.

I was lucky there in that I had a friendly deadline and that was the only thing we were printing. The press at my first shop was shared with the next town over's paper, and we were first, so if we were much later than about 11:30 (later during the busy fall/winter seasons), we would have problems because not only were we behind, but we were now screwing up someone else.

My current shop prints a handful of papers, some dailies, some not. Thankfully, our press is about 10 miles away at the airport and we always go last. So not only do we have the friendliest deadline in the group (sent by 11:30 p.m. CT), we can often take advantage if the papers ahead of us are behind or the press broke down several hours previous.

 

We had midnight CT deadline and did not have it.
Some reputable sources - other than AP - were calling it at that point, but everyone is afraid of a "Dewey defeats Truman" moment as in 2000.

 

We switched deadlines with our copy desk, as we always do. Our deadline is 11:45 eastern, but it was extended 15 minutes for the election. Only thing we could get on the front was Trump winning Kentucky, which came as no shock to anyone -- or at least shouldn't have.

 

The headline assumes we received a Wednesday. We live in a small town about and hour from New Orleans. The Times-Picayune has print editions only three days a week. Wednesday is one of those days but we didn't get Wednesday' paper until Thursday.