10 p.m. deadlines?

At least one of the Singleton papers out here has a 9:50 deadline and two others have a 10 p.m. (thankfully, not on Football Fridays.) Never thought I'd see the day when West Coast papers didn't get the West Coast scores in, but happens every day with Lean Dean.

 

That absolutely blows my mind.

It shouldn't, but it does.

"We can't compete with the Internet! I know how to make our product stand out...MORE STALE CONTENT!"

 

Due to some production changes (where we're printed) we're one and done withthe press run starting at 10 p.m. EASTERN for the next two weeks so they can iron out any delivery/transportation issues. So the pages need to be sent to the presses before that and since we no longer paginate in-house (we send dummy sheets to a sister paper that paginates it and they send it to another paper for printing). Last night's Flyers game which was over at 9:45 didn't make the paper.

 

10 p.m. deadline? Well, at least the bars are open for another two hours.

 

Just throwing this out there as a possibility and not the solution, but why bother with an AM edition and just bring the PM back from the dead?

As a subscriber, I would rather my PM edition have everything in it than an AM paper that had a smattering of news.

So on the news side, every school board or city hall meeting will have a 36-hour lag of being published?

You might want to call the nearest major daily if they want to run a subscription ad in your paper.

 

My thoughts exactly 93. And those of us who BELIEVE that the handlers of our publications really care that we need to compete with the Internet need to have coffee with those big oil people who say the reason gas prices are skyrocketing is we're running out of crude. Do MBAs teach you to lie? I guess.

 

This may out me to, I dunno, two people on here, but a previous paper ran into carrier/delivery issues and changed its deadline to ... 8 p.m.

We were assured it was only temporary, but it went on for months. It finally stopped when the CEO discovered we weren't getting lottery numbers in the paper. He forced us back, against the will of the dick-eating publisher and candy-assed circulation director.

 

I have heard that a move to AM was to actually find carriers. It is too difficult to find the PM carriers.

Does this sound correct?

 

have had similar discussions with my bosses at our shop ... we're a three-times-a-week paper, and I'm a one-man show ... my deadlines were moved up 2.5 hours, which for me is killer. So Tuesday night results don't make the Wednesday paper a lot more frequently ... and we don't come out again till Friday, so it's not like I can just stick them in the next day... meanwhile the competition kills us because they don't publish till midmorning on their press days, plenty of time to get stuff together...

it's all because we want to be more of a morning paper instead of an afternoon paper... yet our content is less timely, so the morning paper has less in it that people may be interested in... don't get it...

 

Boy I don't miss being a one-man sports shop at a place with a 9:30 Central deadline. I especially don't miss the part where Florida decided that girls and boys basketball had to play on different nights, thus eliminating 6 p.m. starts for girls games (and my only realistic hope of getting timely prep hoops in the paper.)

 

Probably a contributing factor, but just one of many. I can imagine it would be difficult to find carriers to work during the day, because so many AM carriers do it as a second job. You can't get by with your primary source of income being carrying newspapers.

But there were many, many more issues that have killed PMs. Getting them delivered in afternoon traffic was one. The 24-hour news cycle was another.

 

I do'nt get how the 24-hour news cycle hurts PMs more than AMs. I worked at one on 9-11. We had that in. We had the Olympics in. I will never understand the death of PM papers.