Immediacy, urgency lost due to early print deadlines
It shouldn't take three days...
Regular readers of The Des Moines Register have noticed for several years now that stories in the print edition are often several days after the actual event occurred. Monday’s city council meeting shows up in Wednesday’s or Thursday’s paper. Friday night football scores show up on Sunday. A new report shows we are not alone. In a well-researched story written for Northwestern University’s Medill Journalism School, newspapers all over the country are struggling with “ridiculously early” print deadlines.
Printing plants are closing, forcing newspapers to print far from home and truck the copies. Diesel fuel costs for those trucks are soaring. Finding experienced printing plant operators to work overnight is increasingly difficult.
“I think fundamentally, print is going away,” retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron says in the Medill story. Forty-five of the top 100 dailies now print six or fewer days per week, including the Register, which no longer prints on Saturdays.
It’s a real problem for states like Iowa with an older population that still clings to the print habit. If you’re one of those readers, you need to know how much you’re missing if you rely solely on print and don’t also check the online coverage.
Saturday’s top story - on Tuesday?
A prime example happened this past weekend when both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis visited the Iowa State Fair on Saturday. It was a huge story, covered by every major newspaper and news network in the country. But in “the newspaper Iowa depends upon”, the once-vaunted Sunday Register had not one mention of Saturday’s important day of politics. This, even though the visits happened Saturday afternoon, presumably well before the Sunday print deadline.
To add insult to injury, when Monday’s print edition arrived – once again – not a single mention of the Trump and DeSantis visits! The Register website and app covered the story in a timely manner, but what about all those Iowans who “depend upon” the print edition? Perhaps they’re uncomfortable with internet technology, or don’t have good internet access. They are woefully uninformed about an important day of politics in the state that starts the presidential selection process.
Finally, on Tuesday, there were several stories buried on page C4 of the Metro section of the Register about the Trump-DeSantis appearances three days earlier.
I asked Register Editor Carol Hunter what time the Register’s print deadline is. She must now refer all media inquiries to Gannett corporate communications, which replied that exact deadlines are “proprietary, but in general, they’re early evening.” If that’s the case, I don’t understand why a Saturday afternoon event at the state fairgrounds in the heart of the city can’t be written in time for the Sunday Register. And I really don’t understand why it didn’t make the Monday edition, particularly when the Register is printed here in town at the southside plant by the airport.
Gannett corporate communications also replied, “Coverage of all the Saturday state fair political appearances are running in the Tuesday print edition, covering three full pages in an effort to offer fair, equivalent coverage for similar candidate appearances.”
Fine, but it shouldn’t take three days to put out “fair, equivalent coverage.”
None of this is the fault of experienced journalists like Hunter or anyone else in the Register newsroom. Every journalist I know wants to get important stories out immediately. It’s a business problem. An economic problem. Readers need to be aware that urgency and immediacy are no longer vital to the print side of the business. If you depend only on the print edition, you will be days behind important stories happening in our state.
By the way, I noticed when researching this column that the Register motto across the top now is “The news Iowa depends upon.” It doesn’t say newspaper anymore. I don’t know when that changed – probably a while ago. But it signifies what’s important these days, and it has nothing to do with paper. Readers beware.
Kansas newspaper raid
The only good thing to come out of the police raid of a small-town Kansas newspaper is the universal condemnation that has rained down on the authorities who approved the raid. You have likely read the shocking details. The prosecutor has now reversed himself and ordered the newsroom computers and cellphones returned to the journalists. I hope all the negative publicity will discourage law enforcement and prosecutors elsewhere in the country from ever trying this again.
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative offers an increasingly wide array of coverage and opinion from across the state. Please check out some of the other writers:
How things have changed. As an aging boomer, I miss the days when newspapers were such a vital part of our lives. During my childhood years the better portion of our family Sundays was devoted to enjoying reading and discussing the newspaper, with it's news, commentary, features and comics. For many years I collected and saved newspapers during my travels and major national and world events. It was always eye opening to see what news was given priority in other parts of our country and in foreign countries. I remember being shocked at the sensational and graphic photos and very pointed political cartoons that were the norm in Central American newspapers. I remember being delighted by the local columnists during the years when I regularly read the San Francisco Chronicle. Now digital news is much more immediate and I have pretty much quit saving print editions of anything but the most significant event stories. It's sad that most newspapers have devolved into a less important part of our lives by not keeping up with the times. Adapt or become irrelevant is the lesson, but it may be too late for anything but eventual extinction of print newspapers as a source of timely quality information.
Participated in a ZOOM meeting with Hunter a year or two ago and I think she said the print schedule is late afternoon, ridiculous for a daily morning publication. I remember well the morning Register and the evening Tribune - I loved dealing with them in my pr role. What I wouldn't give for one edition of the (Sunday) Peach sports section. David Weiss