“Isn’t there anything you can do to get this into this Wednesday’s edition?”
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I took a phone call from a family member who wished to get their loved one’s obituary into, yes, the Wednesday edition. It was time sensitive because the service was being held that weekend, and they wanted to get the word out.
Unfortunately, there truly wasn’t anything I could do to include it in the Wednesday edition because it had already been printed, a copy of which I was looking at on my desk.
It’s never fun to crush someone’s hopes and dreams.
In this situation, I did the best I could, which was: Put the obituary online on our website and send my caller a link to share with family and friends, then schedule it to appear in our next print edition.
The experience made me think that now might be a good time to go over our print schedule so those who are planning to submit content have a better understanding of the process.
The first thing I need to share is that our paper goes to press by 4 p.m. each Monday. We use a printing press based in Salem, and Columbia Gorge News is one of many newspaper jobs they have scheduled.
When all goes right (and basically there is no other option), the printed copies are trucked back to us Tuesday morning and delivered to the post office that afternoon; from there, papers are delivered to mailboxes on Wednesday.
(What happens when all goes wrong — we miss our deadline, or the truck from Salem breaks down, or the post office doesn’t get the papers out? Complete and utter chaos. And a lot of phone calls to the office asking why the paper wasn’t delivered.)
Given that we send the paper to press on Monday afternoons, this means that by Friday morning, we pretty much know what content is going into that upcoming edition. Walking it backwards, this means ideally, all press releases and general submissions are in by Thursday at noon.
It’s a little heartbreaking to get an item, say, on Monday at 3 p.m., with the assumption it will run in the Wednesday paper. Not possible. This goes for press releases, letters to the editor, photo submissions, news, events and announcements.
Deadlines will be earlier for the June 1 edition, given the Memorial Day holiday; see page 2 for details.
We are a weekly paper covering five counties. We get a lot of submissions. Thank you, by the way — we are a small staff and these submissions mean we are able to cover a lot more ground than we could on our own. But because we receive a lot of submissions, the finite pages of the newspaper fill up quickly. Sometimes we can fit something in if it’s received after Thursday at noon, but sometimes not. In other words, we can’t guarantee it.
(We can never guarantee a run date regardless. It all depends on available space.)
The exception to this rule is obituaries — that deadline is Monday at noon in order to give funeral homes and families as much time as possible to submit. Noon is pushing it a little on our end, as the page needs to be built from scratch (obituary submissions and photos laid out on the page with time left to edit). We’ve been running big papers lately (today it’s 16 pages each in A and B) and that is a lot of content to process in one day. Which is why we start the week before. (And sometimes over the weekend.)
Now, you might be asking yourself, what about breaking news? What if something happens on Tuesday after press time? What if you are late with an obituary submission and the service is Friday? What if you weren’t able to send the information earlier because it hadn’t been firmed up yet?
We are always updating the Columbia Gorge News website (www.columbiagorgenews.com). Sometimes it’s breaking news and sometimes it’s a press releases that had to hold or was received too late to include in the current edition. Obituaries go online as they’re received, as do events. Classified ads also go online and has its own tab.
We look at the website as an extension of our print edition — because the news doesn’t stop at deadline. We do post stories to Facebook, but you will find the bulk of the paper online exclusively on our website.
Ad deadlines are different still, as follows: Ad reservation is due by the Wednesday prior to the following week’s edition — so if you’re going for the June 1 edition, you’ll need to get in that ad by May 25. Camera-ready artwork is due by noon the Thursday before (so, for that June 1 edition, we’re talking May 26).
The deadline for Public Notices — also called Legals — is Friday at 4 p.m., and the classified ad deadline is Monday at 9 a.m. These are hard and fast deadlines based on our print schedule.
One last thing: Our staff is not always in the office, and it may take us time to return your phone call. Be assured that every effort is made to call back in a timely manner — but we need you to leave a call back number with your message. Email is also a great way to get in contact with us, and you can always find all of our email addresses on page A4.
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