10 p.m. deadlines?

Side note: I fail to see the point of runbacks for most of the Big 4 sports - and more so those games that are nowhere near your coverage area (regionalizing agate is obviously important and necessary for cause to have a runback). In this day of smaller web sizes and scaled-back column inches, why in the heck would papers devote 3 columns in a Sunday-for-Monday paper for 8 MLB runbacks, for example?!?

 

Lot of it was a switch from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. As factory jobs dried up in big cities, you didn't have as many folks getting off work at 3 p.m. or 3:30 p.m., then plopping down with a paper.

That's part of the problem now for even the AMs -- people are starting their morning routines earlier and earlier, leaving no time to read at that end of the day either. And Katie Couric is learning that people don't get home in time to tune in to the network evening news, too.

 

The newspaper suits could find a way to fuck up selling cold beer at a NASCAR event.

 

"Well, most people are watching the games on TV, so why do we need to have them in the newspaper?"

Works for me. Cut the deadlines back to 9 p.m. Let's come in at noon and then go hit the clubs.

 

In sports, maybe that's true. But the majority of news happens in the afternoon, between, I don't know, 1 and 5, maybe. You have to get a PM out the door at 11 or 12, and you're including stories that say, "The Senate was poised Wednesday to kill a bill," when it actually does so (or worse yet, doesn't) at 3.

At least with the AM cycle, you can be pretty well-assured that not much is going to happen between 11 and 7. Yeah, they're reading yesterday's news, but it's still the most recent news. With a PM, that's not the case.

 

Wow and I thought I was the only stuck in a shop like this. For the past four weeks our deadlines have been 8:15 for the first edition and 8:45 for the final edition (7:15 deadline for one edition on Friday).

They claim it's only temporary (had to change printing location), but needless to say if this lasts much longer there isn't much point in having a sports section with deadlines like that.

 

I imagine carriers have been taking it in the shorts with the gas prices, since most are treated as "independent" contractors. And yet the fate of the industry, all of the work of many talented people comes down to the flick of some person's wrist and the quality of his or her aim.

 

Not to mention that person's ability to put down the meth pipe and get the '89 Trans Am to turn over.

 

Was it the Pittsburgh or the Detroit strike that was based around the carriers?

 

Since I work at a marginally successful one, the thinking is because of technology it has allowed more to get into the AM. NO longer is your box score,local news etc time constrained with an AM.

Also, the problem with a PM is it is on the news stand late. Our paper doesn't hit all our areas until 2 p.m. So, you lose hours of prime sale time from 5 q.m. . The shelf life on the news stand is lower.

Interesting though. I had a colleague at an AM daily whose deadlines are pushed to 10 p.m. that he thinks in the current marketplace PMs are better. If you can't get anything in, you should just go late and get everything in.

If you can do it right, a PM will work tremendously.

 

Yeah, and I thought our 10:30 deadlines were bad. You may lose prime sales times by going p.m., but think of how much interest you lose by staying a.m. with nothing in the paper.

 

I know of a semi-daily community newspaper in Kentucky (Sunday and Monday: apparently not actual days) that has a 4 p.m. sports deadline and 7 p.m. final deadline. They also print three other papers — none a daily, two of which they don't even own — which go on the presses after their own paper. Management doesn't want to tell the other papers to accept earlier deadlines because it doesn't want to lose the printing contracts.