The Printer’s Devil

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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.