10 p.m. deadlines?

Agreed. I think late baseball boxes are the biggest waste of space, especially for an East Coast paper that has to run a handful of them on most days.

 

Should someone start aiming to have their papers hit the street around 7pm? Maybe dinner and a paper will become the next big thing? You'd have time to get most, if not, all daytime news in print and on the streets before any AMs. Of course the problem is that every night's sports is 24 hours old by the time the next edition comes out.

Or what about a PM paper with a sports extra in the morning? Nah, they wouldn't want to go on two delivery runs....come to think of it, they don't want to do anything but get as much money as they can out of advertisers before the newspaper-reading demographic is completely dead in 15-20 years or so....

There are still a couple PMs around here. I do some sports stringer work for one. It's nice when a HS baseball game goes into extra innings and you don't have to worry about a deadline that night.

 

Even better than earlier deadlines. How about a newspaper completely filled with what we think will happen in the coming days. News analysis of how the war will go, which campaign is in trouble, how a movie will do on an opening weekend, whether a sports team will have a good season, what the weather will be like.

 

Just call it yesterday's scores tomorrow... We've had the 10 p.m. sports deadline for a year now....

 

A PM paper is like taking an AM paper, putting it away, and not reading it till suppertime.

Old news.

If something big like 9/11 happens in the morning, you get lucky. That's about a one-in-1,000 shot.

 

Our PM is considering going AM (we're already AM on the weekend, obviously). We already run the news dept. like an AM, done by 11:30 p.m. and a morning editor does final proofing or any overnight updates before the 9:30 a.m. press run.
Sports crew sticks around til west coast games are finals, which is nice but a pain if you're sitting waiting for that 22 inning Padres game to end.
Our publisher mentioned the marketing aspects, buy The Podunk Times and a small coffee for a buck at the Quik-E-Mart and a longer shelf life.
The time has come for us to go AM. I feel for the press guys and the circ crew which will have their hours drastically changed but it's time.

 

10 p.m. sucks bad. We had it bad with a stiff 10:45 at my old shop, then it was sporadically moved up to 10 and even 9:30 (no bullshit) when the weather got bad. That's because our print shop was 45 minutes away. My favorite moment was when a prep team qualify for state. 3 paragraphs and no picture. Parents were not amused and didn't buy the early deadline excuse.

When I left, I found out our true deadline was midnight, but the publisher felt the sports staff couldn't handle a lax deadline like that. Dickhead.

 

When I arrived at the Commercial Appeal a dozen years ago, my copy deadline was 11:30 p.m. and I could push it to midnight if necessary. Now the essential copy deadline is 10:15 p.m. weekdays, 10 p.m. Sundays.

 

Does that sound like I'm whining? I'm really not whining. I'm just dutifully reporting in.

 

We go in 10:30 with first edition ... but then 12:40 for final.

It strikes me that a newspaper using any gray matter at all would realize it can bide time with 3,000-5,000 early-edition papers and stop the presses long enough to replate at least an hour later.

 

On Friday night, sports is last out, with final page deadline at 11:45 p.m. ET (12:15 from September-March).

We're still a PM. There's one paper in our ownership group that's an AM. I actually interviewed there, and they said they've actually run into major problems with it, because in our area (northern Great Lakes), bad weather often means large numbers of papers don't get delivered until the snowplows come out in the winter. Considering we had several 6-inch or greater winter storms this winter, it's actually kind of justifiable.

(Oh, and in our paper, all national boxscores are viewed by our SE as a waste of space.)

 

We have 8:45 p.m. spring deadlines, but they do move back to 11:30 p.m. during football season and move up to 10 p.m. during hoops season. We used to have 11:30 p.m. deadline year round, but that changed when we got a new publisher last September.