The Printer’s Devil

I’d like to apologize for my absence.

Late last year, I had a death in my immediate family and my Muse left me and I’ve been silent these many months.

However, as they say, life is for the living and life goes on. I’m back and I’ll start posting to this site. I’ve always had a lengthy list of topics I’ve wanted to discuss and so little time to list them.

As they say on Star Trek: Live long and prosper.

Time is your enemy. Don’t make it everyone else’s enemy

As an editor, you’ll never have enough of it and the time pressure can be daunting at times, especially a half-hour before press time.

As I’ve mentioned, don’t hesitate to spend some of your publisher’s money if something helps you to cut corners on beating the clock.

Because if you’re not on time, no one is. You are the key link in the chain. It’s important to make sure the carriers get out the door with their bundles on time.

The ad people are never on time — I know one managing editor who grabbed finished pages and literally raced back to the press room with them before the ad director, with Xacto knife in hand, could change ads and their sizes while the finished pages were sitting on the composing room dumps.

All that wonderful modern technology that zips your thoughts into a finished plate on the press ain’t perfect — you’ll find it breaks down at inconvenient times.

The press room depends on you to be on-time so they can be on-time, that is if their old, creaking presses don’t burn out bearings or need sleeve rollers replaced.

The goal is to get carriers out the door and papers on doorsteps on time.

It used to be that most carriers were school kids who got a nice income from throwing papers.

And for most afternoon papers, there was a lull of an hour or two between the time the papers were printed and when the carriers got out of school. If the newsroom was late, it wasn’t a crisis.

For a variety of reasons — and not entirely because “kids are lazy and don’t want to work these days” — most carriers are adults or papers have jettisoned carriers all together and bulk-mail the papers.

For the adult carriers, delivering the newspaper is one of what may be two or three part-time jobs and they’ve budgeted their time so that if you’re late, they’ll have to skip supper or be late for the night job. They scream loudly to the circulation director and publisher and some may even quit. And as a circulation director can tell you, finding a reliable person to work for part-time wages can be tricky.

Motor carriers — those are the people who fill all those newspaper tubes along country roads in rural areas and who carry newspaper bundles to surrounding small towns — can drive 60 to 70 miles one way. I’ve worked for papers in the Great Plains and I know some motor carriers who drove 120 miles one way.

For adult carriers, minutes are hours, and hours are gold.

An aside: Keep an eye on weather predictions. If it looks like the weather will turn nasty that day, with heavy snow, ice or rain; strive mightily to get the paper out early.

It gives the carriers extra time to be on time.

However, be sure to check with your chief pressman before you make that decision and let the publisher know.

In my last post, I discussed the power of “don’t mess with my TV” and how it might affect the Digital TV revolution of 2008 — and like the French revolutionaries of more than 200 years ago, the present-day revolutionaries may find themselves being guillotined by even more radical revolutionaries.

But the power of “don’t mess with my TV” also applies to your newspaper.

I refer to your TV listings. Not all, but most, daily newspapers have them.

If your paper has TV listing, do nothing.

If your paper doesn’t have TV listings, absolutely do absolutely nothing about it. You don’t know how lucky you are.

Don’t allow the hot-shot ad director talk the publisher or you into creating or expanding the TV listings. They’ll spin fantasies about how everyone reads them and how they’re a golden opportunity for advertisers.

Kill the ad director (figuratively). But if you know what sort of problems TV listings will create for you, literally may also be OK.

TV listings, tabloids and sections are dogs.

They’re well read — they are one of the most read and most used sections of the paper.

But don’t let the ad director kid you; you can’t get advertisers near one.

Why that is, I don’t know. But I’ve seen enough TV listing sections to know advertisers aren’t interested, no matter how hard ad sales reps peddle them.

They are constant money-losers.

You see some well-designed and artistic TV sections, especially in larger papers. I’ll bet that they’re even bigger money losers.

But you as editor are stuck with them.

You can’t rid of them.

TV listings are blackmail — and it’s the readers who are the blackmailers.

Newspapers lose money printing the things, but they lose a lot more money by not printing the things.

Like the small retailer on a block in a big city, the newspapers pay protection money to keep from bricks or firebombs from flying through the windows.

Stupid but busy publishers always try, though. Cut costs is the watchword and they quickly see if you cut the TV listings, you cut some significant costs.

You can’t convince them otherwise and they have to learn the hard way.

And if you read my previous post on digital TV, it will be very hard.

They banish the TV listings or order major cuts in them so “they pay for themselves.”

That’s when the calls start coming in — fast and furious as the movie title says.

I’ve fielded a bunch of those calls, and those little old ladies and guys aren’t happy. Almost always, they cancel their subscriptions.

“That’s the only reason I subscribe to the damn paper,” they yell.

Unreasonable, yes. Blowing smoke, yes. But absolutely believe their threats that they’ll cancel the paper.

Normally, I’ll kick the calls over to the publisher — I figure stupid but busy publishers should deal with some of the consequences of their folly — until they get tired of them and make you or the front office ladies deal with them. That doesn’t take too long, by the way.

As the readers cancel, the publishers are strutting around congratulating themselves about how tough they are and how they’re able to make the necessary decisions.

At 100 cancellations, the publishers are still strutting around but they don’t come out of the office for repeat performances as often.

At 125, there are still self-congratulatory high-fives but they give the distinct impression of whistling in the dark. They also talk about how wrong-headed the readers are and how they don’t deserve such a fine paper.

But at 150 cancellations, with no signs of the cascade of cancellations from ending, publishers are nervous and looking over their shoulders and they’re fielding pointed questions from the CorpsNews bean counters.

At 200, they’re jibbering wrecks desperate to find someone to surrender to. They frantically run giant ads about the TV listings coming back, bigger and better. (Although you should be careful to keep “bigger and better” from happening.)

They’re money losers so you need to crank them out as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Technically, you could put them together yourself.

TV stations are eager to send you their weekly schedules and changes.

Don’t do it.

That’s a colossal time waster.

As I’ll frequently mention in these postings, as a managing editor, time is your No. 1 enemy and in my book it’s far better to spend the CorpsNews’ money than your time.

Although they’re expensive and there’s little competition, use one of those services that does the listings for you.

For a lot more money, they’ll also produce the entire the TV section for you but I found it’s cheaper, even considering the time loss, to have them send you the completed listings and do the rest yourself.

You fill it with wire stuff. I also liked grabbing puzzles and games from some of the ad department’s free fillers as a way to get kids involved in reading the paper. (I’ve found that works.)

I’ve mention one editor’s solution to TV listings — a solution I thought worthy of emulation.

The editor decided it was dumb for his newspaper to encourage readers to watch TV instead of reading the paper.

So he ditched the hot starlet stories and photos endemic to TV sections. He started putting stories about books or offbeat Sunday stories in the TV section.

If he put anything about TV, it was stories and scandals that put the TV industry in a bad light, such as cable networks squabbles with sports networks or greedy TV executives — he called it his campaign of subversion.

His paper hit the jackpot. He put in an unflattering story about cable TV and the next week, the local cable TV company put an ad in the TV tab, which was followed the next week by a satellite TV company reiterating the unflattering cable TV story, which prompted another ad from the cable TV company.

It was one of the few times that a TV listings section was actually making some money for the paper.