Big Paper

Days before vacations are funny things. As a general rule, people work hard to get stories in by their deadlines, but it can't always happen. An interview falls through, a call isn't returned, it takes a week to turn around some numbers and then it's suddenly it's 6:00 on the night of production and the anecdote, quote, fact, or stat that makes the story is missing and it needs to get held a day. But for some reason, when writers are faced with a 12 day wait until the next paper, they somehow pull everything together for deadline.
Such was the case today when, on our last night of production before spring break, we had a total of 18 stories on our docket, three times the number that we have on our worst days and about twice our average.
So what do you do when you have an 18-story paper? A few things. First, you barter with the Managing Editor to see how much space you can get. Every day, you need a bare minimum of 2200 words to put out a paper. But from the minimum to the maximum, there's a fair bit of flexibility. Basically, there's a semester-long publishing budget that can be allocated across the year in any way the editors see fit. An average eight to 10 page issue costs in the neighborhood of $1,200, more if the inside is in color or with our Monday and Friday sports supplements. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'll ask Amanda and John for the exact numbers and relay them here in the next coupla days.
Generally, news runs a half page of Off Lead and an additional half to 2/3 of a page of "jump" space, but on a day with a lot of content, we can ask for more than that and, if it fits within the semesterly budget, we can have some flexibility. The most I can ever remember running is three or three and a half pages of jump plus the front--incidentally (actually, not incidentally), also on one of the last days before a break. This budgeting depends on a lot of things, but my favorite, and the least understood, is that we can only run an even number of pages because whenever we print a front of a page, it always has a back. Thus, if opinion has 2 pages, sports has 1.5, arts has 1.5, and there are 3.5 pages of ads, then the options are running a 10 page paper with one allocated for news and a half for Off Lead--in other words, our bare minimum--or a 12 page paper which is the minimum plus up to two pages of jump. With 18 stories on the docket, confronted with cutting 2/3 of the content, Amanda made up a 12 page paper.
Three and a half pages of news. In layman's terms, that's between 9,500 and 10,000 words, a nice 30 words of Times New Roman double-spaced 12 point font, and that's before taking into account all of the photos which are shot, cropped, and otherwise edited (I don't know what they do--I'm not a photographer and the pages look pretty). That's actually almost exactly the amount of content that we began the night with when we had 18 stories, but as anybody who has ever dealt with a 30 page paper can tell you, it takes a long time to edit that much. Indeed, our team of editors and layout people probably would have taken something on the order of 13 hours to create a paper out of that much content.
The nice thing about having too-big papers instead of too-small ones is that you can run what we call "House Ads"--usually public service announcements given to us by the Ad Council or small banners advertising Spectator that take up space whereas with a too-small paper, we have to cut words, photos, and graphics to make it all fit.
So we looked at the content, chose I think four or five stories that didn't have any pressing time hook--most of which had already been pushed back at the writer's request, signaling to us that they could be held--and pushed through. It was still one of our latest nights of the semester, but if you look at our paper, I think that you'll agree that's it's also one of our best.
On a different note, just because it's spring break, don't expect Editorjosh to shut down. I'm fleshing out a couple of ideas for the hiatus so keep coming back and be sure to make comments and ask questions--we all really want this to be as interactive as possible.