Earliest Night of the Semester

Once a month, all thirteen editors on the news board come together to talk about issues affecting the whole section. Two nights ago, we had our second such meeting of the semester and the main focus was PDF times--the time at which the print edition is saved in its final form and ready to be sent to the printer in Queens. The progress that we saw during the first three weeks has slowed down as the associates are now getting the hang of the job, and with breaking news happening late in the night for the past few weeks, our average time of completion has been getting later and later. So with Editor-in-Chief John Davisson, we spent half of our meeting discussing strategies for making the night earlier.
This wasn't one of the suggestions.
At 10:00 on Tuesday night, I got a call from the associate news editor for Wednesday night saying that several stories had been delayed on the story list over the previous 24 hours and as a result, we only had a total of three stories and one photo for today's paper, all of which were only about 400 words. As a general rule of thumb, we look for a minimum of 7 articles and 3200 words to be mildly comfortable, but we can't run less than a page and a half of content, which translates roughly to 5 stories and 2300 words (not including events calendar and daily Off Lead features) as a bare minimum. Three stories is a big hole on the front page and another one on page two or three.
When this happens, Erin and I look reapproach stories for which we couldn't get writers the first time, look to see if there's anything we can push up, try to find events, and see what else we can do. We got on the horn, started making calls and found that we did in fact have some wiggle room. We pushed a feature story up a day, adding 500 words and a photo to the sked, reassigned a story that had fallen through every day for a week about a committee working to draft Jeff Sachs for president for another 450, got some facts about breaking news that we been hearing rumblings about that we figured we could pull together 350 words on, added an event story on a woman from Democracy Now! coming to speak for 500, and we remembered that there was a fireside chat at Barnard that we had forgotten we had assigned that would give us 500 words and a strong photo. In essence, we pulled 1800 words and two photos out of our asses, got us above our threshold, and went home for the night feeling pretty comfortable.
Then, all hell broke loose. The reporter on the feature that we had moved up a day fell through, couldn't pull together the breakingish news, lost one of the initial three stories and realized we had the wrong day on a second one. For those of you liberal arts majors out there having trouble with the math, that meant we had 4 stories, 1750 words, one story short of what we needed.
The second time that stories fall through, we scour Facebook, fliers around campus, and any other events listing we can find and pray that we can find somebody on our staff willing to bail us out. Praise be to Allah, we found an intriguing event as part of Black Heritage Month and a writer, the up-and-coming Julie Appel, who was willing to cover it, and one of our Off Lead features came in 100 words over word count. Five stories, 2300 words, breathing normally.

...

And then, at nine p.m. a second of the original three stories fell through.
If the first time we scavenge and the second time we scour, when stories fall through for the third time, Erin and I usually start to swear.
If you're looking at today's paper, obviously we don't have a big hole on the middle of page three. We had received a press release four nights ago saying that the Columbia Mock Trial had pulled out a win in a regional tournament and was going to nationals. We didn't think that the win merited a story as of yet, and told Evan Daar, the team's secretary, that we would cover them at the finals. Nothing makes you reevaluate newsworthiness quite like being three hours after deadline and confronted with a chasm of nothingness. I called up Daar, talked to him for 15 minutes, did some background reporting and pulled together 317 words and a stock photo in about 40 minutes.
The daily miracle continues, and, since it doesn't take very long to edit 2200 words, we PDF'd at 1:47 p.m., the earliest time all semester by a good 40 minutes.