Wednesday 23 September 2009

Early deadlines

The growing list of Sun Media newspaper press runs at Quebecor's printing plant in Toronto is causing havoc with deadlines, says a TSF tipster.

The tipster says with printing of the Brantford Expositor being moved to Toronto, it has bumped the Welland Tribune's copy deadline to 7:30 p.m., with final pages at 8:30 p.m.

"Worse," says the tipster, "Niagara Falls (Review) copy deadline is 6:30 p.m.."

Ah, for the good old days when managing editors had full control of deadlines and press runs, with replates for breaking news, sports and entertainment to keep their newspapers current for readers.

The Toronto plant's growing list of newspapers to print is a calamity in waiting, as was the printing of the Ottawa Sun in Mirabel, Que., before that decision was reversed.

10 comments:

  1. Morning coverage of late events, such as sports, accidents, crime or local politics, was the last advantage newspapers had over television, and now it's disappearing. The websites may have the news, but newsstand buyers and subscribers will miss out. Again, the company is making decisions that seem intended to force print operations out and shift the focus to the web.

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  2. Nothing ever happen's after 6:30 p.m. in Niagara Falls anyway, Right?

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  3. Five years and all the non-Sun papers are online only.

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  4. Not related to this but I was going through your archives and found this poll from over two years ago http://torontosunfamily.blogspot.com/2007/09/tsf-poll-results.html

    It would be interesting to do the same poll now and have a comparison. Id love to see how much the numbers have changed, especially about the outlook for the papers, etc.

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  5. I'm really not sure what the hell PKP is doing. It almost seems like he bought the Osprey papers to put them out of business. It's so sad. Weeklies are going to end up being the local newspaper of record if this trend continues.
    I respect that it's a business and at the end of the day, it's PKP's job to make money - but I don't see how any of his strategies are going to make Sun Media money.
    A 6:30 p.m. deadline seems insane for a daily newspaper - no sports scores whatsoever. And sports should be a circulation driver.

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  6. The deadlines for those two papers is actually up in the air at the moment

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  7. It should be noted that Brantford moved in haste to Islington to combat the new newspaper in Brantford. PKP must be getting a little worried that his plan may not work as he dreamed. His hope would be to have all online, because that's what people want...right? Look to the battles beginning in all of the centres that are walking away from the readers and advertisers. All those presses sitting waiting to be sold, just a shame. Wonder if PKP has thought about upcoming contracts in London press room in 2010. The power they now have is unbelieveable. If they strike who will print 30 or so products? Hmmm think PKP can fix that with a dream?

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  8. For a company so worried about the online product, they sure do have ugly, non-user friendly websites.

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  9. I was just thinking that. Any news content is buried in a shifting mess of flashing ads and banners. Why are the ads right down the middle? And what is this UR thing on the side? It eats up so much space and is barely used on our paper's site. Sun designers should look at websites that work and apply some of those design ideas. If the idea is to drive readers from the papers to the websites, you want websites people would want to read.

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  10. I'm waiting for unions to come calling on these so-called "Centres of Excellence." They all seem like perfect targets, since all of the workers are demoralized and underpaid.
    Can you imagine the impact of a unionized pagination/ad building centre on Sun Media's business infrastructure?
    I seem to recall a proverb about putting all of your eggs in one basket...

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