Newspaper Business Is Puzzling

As I was putting together this week’s newspaper, I was reminded again how much like working a puzzle it is. However, with a puzzle, most of the pieces are about the same size, and you know what you have to start with. I, for one, build my frame, then fill in.

With the newspaper, you have to first figure out the size of the frame (how many pages). That is determined by the amount of advertising, generally. My mother had a formula, and listed all the ads, added up the inches, and determined how many pages to go. How nice.

Somehow we’ve gotten to the point where we get very little ahead of deadline to use for planning, and oftentimes much of what we get is after deadline. (Deadline is 5 p.m. Monday for most items.)

So, it’s a real guessing game. And, sometimes we have a wide open paper, and sometimes we have a tight paper. This week, for example, we chose to run Betty Jean Jordan’s whole story rather than breaking it into two parts, so it took a lot of room.

Those of you who love sports may be disappointed, because all the sports are not going to fit. I could go up two pages, but as anyone who has seen me knows, I really like to eat.

It often is a real conundrum. We may have a lot of news, and not many ads, and sometimes we go up in pages to accommodate the news. Sometimes it waits.

I have one contributor who always wants to know if I’m going to have room. I don’t know most of the time. It’s a difficult guessing game. And weeks like this week, we have two meetings on Tuesday night, which may or may not make Thursday’s paper, as well as the Monday night meeting that I attended.

It’s very difficult to complete the paper as much as possible on Tuesday evening, which I like to do, when you don’t know how much will be written about the meeting. Sometimes the shortest agendas turn into some pretty long meeting updates.

There’s just three of us in the office to work on the paper—my sister, Jenny Murphy, advertising director an photo editor, long-time employee Susan Jacobs who is a copy editor and reporter, and myself. Susan and I also take turns writing features and columns.

There’s also Chris Bridges who does Piedmont sports, Kim Joris with Monticello sports, and several others.

Jenny is creative and can make ads really well. Susan deals with the schools and pulls together the school news, the sports, and covers court.

I try to pull it all together, and I write on county commission, school board, and lots more. Anyway, usually it works, but sometimes it is really frustrating (like most jobs.)

I’ve been asked if I like my job. Some days it is the best job in the world; other days, not so much…like it may border on the worst job in the world. (Think Thursday, when you made a big mistake in print.)

But, I digress, and I must get back to my puzzle.