Tri-County News

‘Why isn’t that in the paper?’


Jean Matua “From the Heart”

Part 2

A continuation from last week’s column, there are a few more reasons something doesn’t get into the Tri-County News on a given week.

It was sent to us too late

We really try  not to mess with our deadlines, and only change them when absolutely necessary. Most weeks, 2 p.m. Monday is our deadline to have ads, photos or stories submitted for that week’s paper. Because we usually go to press Tuesday night (the press runs at 5 a.m. Wednesday, whether we’re ready or not), that gives us a day to finalize everything and put it all together into a newspaper.

Once a month, we print a saturation issue: 5,000+ copies of the paper instead of 1,300-some copies. Because it’s a big job, and the press only has one guy working Wednesdays, we have to print at
5 a.m. Tuesday those weeks. That’s when we change our deadline to
3 p.m. the Friday before that week. It’s the only way we can get everything done correctly to make it into the paper and get it all pulled together to print on-time. (By the way, there is no “late” alternative for printing the paper; if it’s not there on-time, there may not be a paper that week).

We really try to avoid sneaking something in last-minute. It’s been our experience that, more often than not, something gets messed up when we do that – and it’s usually someone else’s ad.

Someone forgot to send it

Sometimes it’s a new person in charge of advertising, sometimes no one is sure who’s responsible. Maybe everyone thinks someone else sent us the event information for an ad or bulletin, but in reality no one did. We totally understand this. But we can’t put something in the paper that we don’t get. We’d rather get something sent to us three times than not at all (and everyone thinks we got it).

It gets lost in ‘email hell’

We get hundreds of emails a day. At its worst, we got 4,000+ in a single day! Today we have layers of spam filter to make our email load more manageable. Every once in awhile, something ends up in the spam net instead of our inbox. We try to send a reply email to confirm that we got yours. If you don’t get a confirmation, please email us again or call. We’d rather get an extra phone call or email than miss something important!

There wasn’t room for it (yet)

Our first priority when filling up each week’s paper is paid ads and legals, obituaries, and time-
critical information (like events happening within the coming week). We can’t just print an extra page or two; we have to go up four full pages to make more room. Sometimes that’s just not practical. So news items of events that are weeks or months away may get “bumped” to next week. If it’s something that only a few of our readers may be interested in, that also may be bumped to next week (or bumped out entirely).

It may not be ready (yet)

Sometimes we just don’t have all the pieces ready yet. Rather than jump in with something that may be incomplete (or worse, inaccurate), we may choose to wait so we can get it right.

We goofed up

We try hard to keep track of everything that needs to go into the paper each week (especially anything paid). We’re human, and our production days (Mondays and Tuesdays) sometimes get crazy with lots of interruptions and distractions. Sometimes I’ll place something on a page, then move it off to place it somewhere else, but get interrupted and forget to put it back. As rare as it is, that’s the most common reason to miss something in the paper. Sometimes it’s just a fluke. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often, and we’ll do whatever we can to make it right.

It just wasn’t appropriate for our audience

Every once in awhile, we’re sent something that we consider inappropriate for our audience. We aim for a PG-type rating, for readers of all ages. If you send us something we find objectionable, we’ll let you know; perhaps we’re misreading something, or maybe it can be rewritten. We’ll communicate our concerns, though.

The bottom line

We do our very best each week to put together a community newspaper that’s interesting, informative, and relatable to a wide audience within our readership area. We hear it nearly every day: “We love your paper!” So we feel fairly confident that we’re achieving our goal. But we’re always looking for ways to make things even better; sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. We appreciate your input!

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