I must admit, I expected a bit of a reaction from readers when I came to work today because of our sparse coverage of the Oregon State and Oregon games in Sunday’s paper. But I haven’t heard or seen anything, and my phone and e-mail are working. I assume the connection was made by our loyal readers that football games that begin at 7:30 and 8 p.m. wreak havoc on newspaper deadlines.
This, of course, was the case. Our deadline to have all our pages cleared and to the press is 11:50 p.m. The Beaver game got over at 11:10 — sooner than we expected because there wasn’t much scoring in the early going. A 4-inch story moved over the Associated Press in time for us to get it in. We got more on the Duck game because it ended a little before 11, and one of the reasons the story was longer was it contained quite a bit of background on LeGarrette Blount’s situation. We edited most of that out to get the game stuff in.
With deadline rolling down on us like that big boulder in the Indiana Jones movie, we contained those stories to the cover without jumping them inside and further tying up another page.
Despite our best efforts, we missed deadline by a few minutes, and that is frowned upon.
Another casualty of the late game starts was a notes package or sidebar on each game. We hire folks to do those most weeks, but it wasn’t prudent on this night.
Hopefully, there won’t be too many instances where we have to cut corners like that.
