Any tips for hitting new deadline?

Do your thing, and when the publisher bitches about missed deadlines, tell him you thought he meant Aleutian Time Zone 10:15.

 

do more roundups and less full game stories. plug and then remake.
Make sure the publisher realizes the consequences.
How big is your shop -- do you have one edition, three editions?
If you only have one edition, you're screwed. If you have more than one edition, it can work.
The big thing is to make sure you have a good system for following up the next day.

 

Write. Shorter.

And when you get calls bitching about prep stuff not getting in, explain to the pissed off parent or coach and then give them the publisher's number.

 

a guy who used to be on my beat more than once over the years called his desk just before deadline and asked if they got his story. which he hadn't filed.

they'd check and say, no, it wasn't in there. he'd sound perplexed, say there must be a computer problem, old rickety laptop, and he'll work on it

then he'd finish the story, the computer problem would mysteriously be solved, and he'd file 10 or 15 minutes late. his desk thought he was a hero for figuring out his computer issue and getting his story in all on deadline

brilliant

 

Yeah, that's something to be proud of. [/sarcasm]

 

You'd get away with that once maybe. Keep doing it, and they conclude you're a clod with a computer and they don't trust you any more.

 

I had to deal with that before, when an obnoxious publisher decided to give us impossible deadlines to reach during high school basketball nights.
I did the only thing I knew to do. I told the coaches of my situation and told them to feel free to complain when their games weren't published in the paper.
Needless to say, I don't work for that jerk any more. Thank God!

 

Don't work harder, work smarter!

Sorry, had to say that.

What kind of stupid-ass system uses a deadline that early? I mean, goodness people, why not just have a noon deadline for an a.m. paper?
That's ridiculous. With the advances in technology we have, there is no reason for these deadlines to be going this direction. You'd think better technology would push things the other direction.

 

A cost-cutting system. Using our sister paper an hour away to paginate and print the paper. Their advanced presses can print both papers at once. However their production systems to get the papers to the presses (editing, photo, pagination) can't handle the copy flow from both papers at once, so we're stuck clearing the way early for at least one of our three editions edition to make sure we don't gum up the works for their paper. All of our editions are 1-1.5 hours earlier than they were when we were paginating and printing the paper ourselves.

 

There's not much you can do. Just put in your time and do the best you can. I'd toss out not using a recorder for interviews because of the time involved in extracting quotes from it, but that's probably pretty obvious.

We moved up deadline a few years ago and we made it very clear to the publisher/ME that we needed a later deadline on Friday nights for football if they wanted any kind of local sports section. He agreed and pushed that deadline up. Not sure if you have that same kind of flexibility or not.

 

Is this a copy deadline or the time the pages need to be sent?

 

Edit the product. That's all you can do.