Dear dimwit on the phone

Bingo

 

Dear press room 20 miles away,

I miss deadline a lot during basketball season. Glad it took you only until mid-January to complain about it this year. Now you will sit back and listen as I explain to you once again how an 11 p.m. deadline imposed on a one-man sports department makes meeting deadline impossible. How about this: Just shut up and relax and things will be OK again come the second week of March.

(Up) Yours,

Apeman.

 

11 p.m.?!? Christ almighty, how does your paper's management expect to get anything in the paper? I was at a college-town daily once that had an 11:30 drop dead on Saturday nights, which was a challenge when we had night games. But off the floor at 11? That's a joke, right?

 

We'd love to have 11 for our sister paper on Friday nights. Second has to be sent by 10:15 p.m. because it's the first of four the press is printing that night because my company won't fix the broken printing press in our own state.

 

Hacker: Nope, no joke. I'm supposed to be completely done and have it in the dropbox so the press room can pluck it out at 11 p.m. And this would be after a night of covering a girls-boys high school basketball doubleheader, editing the pictures, writing the stories, laying out, getting in whatever happens to come in from the rural schools. I'm lucky to be back from the gym by 9:30. Juco's only a little bit easier because they start their doubleheaders at 5:30.

Also, we're all-mail delivery. Even if you live across the street from our office, you get your paper in the mail. So it has to be back here to be labeled and have whatever inserts get in it and delivered to the post office by 4 a.m. to avoid either a trip up to Kansas City that would delay delivery a day or trucking it to each individual post office in our coverage area*.

I was originally going to be stuck with a 10 p.m. deadline Mon.-Thu. nights. I had to remind them that high school and college games don't happen just on weekends.

If an ultimatum ever comes down, then I'll counter with "Fine, but the only way to make deadline will be to delay game stories one day." Then I'll let that sink in for a few minutes.

I mean the company has only imposed this upon me for five years. I guess they haven't figured it out yet**.

* - Trucking to each post office has happened only twice and both times it was because the truck got into a wreck. Same-day delivery was salvaged by bringing in another truck.
** - However, I don't know if the press rooms complaints have ever reached the publisher. As far as I know, they've only complained to our managing editor. And that's funny considering no one complained how often I missed deadline for sports and other reasons during the year and a half I was also the interim managing editor.

 

Same boat here Apeman...although it's a bit looser...11:15 p.m. is the drop-dead really it seems. Still, it's a challenge when you juggling photos, phones, your own gamer(s), etc. I'm usually right up against it.

One suggestion (take it or leave it)...when we dropped staff a couple years back, I found I had to drop something from our nightly rotation to make deadline. So I chose to drop boxscores. We still run capsules if coaches call-in results, but just stick to game-winning highlights and high scorers. Going through the entire scoring summary with every coach took about twice as long as what we do now...plus we shaved the time of typing those boxes in...that was the half-hour I needed to hit deadline on a regular basis.

People have noticed that it's not there anymore, but until I can hire a part-timer to man the phones on deadline nights that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

 

I've already dumped national pro standings because formatting took too long. I've also dropped all but the most basic coverage of the farthest out rural schools. They've been gravitating toward a large weekly for the past few years anyway.

I think I actually have a bigger problem when I have too much space to fill. It's deadline, there's this huge hole, and now it looks like the only way to fill it is to break the hyperlocal rule. Well, they're not going to print a blank page....

 

I've found it helps if I can dig up a quick photo to run with recaps...doesn't always work into the schedule, but if I can swing by a gym on my way somewhere else and shoot for 10 minutes that can eat up space on an inside page.

Basic rule on deadline...larger photos and fill ads.
and I'd rather break the hyper local rule than be late for deadline, but that may not be the case everywhere.

 

If they are demanding hyper local, they need to supply the staff to make that possible.

 

I hate house ads as well, but Flex is right. On deadline, they're your friends. But I only want to use a couple and keep them small if possible.

 

First, we gotta get people willing to come to Podunk to work at our itty bitty daily. We're a news reporter down right now and I've only heard of one applicant for that job.

It was kind of like when I was interim ME. In 18-plus months I don't even think we talked more than six people. I only remember that many, anyway. And one of them was a manager at a video store and didn't realize that "managing editor" wasn't the same as "store manager."

 

Give Doodah a ring...he's always looking for a job to apply for. Heck, he will call you everyday until you hire him it seems.