Producing a weekly newspaper has always had its challenges when it comes to following current events that sometimes change between when the paper is put to bed and when it shows up in mailboxes.
At the Western Producer, where we have a production deadline of Monday and a publication date of Thursday, that can make for some nail-biting situations.
We have always tried to manage this time lag by concentrating as much as possible on more analytical stories that get behind the daily headlines and don’t depend as much on being totally up-to-date.
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The arrival of the internet and the development of www.producer.com made it easier to manage this challenge.
In fact, we decided last year to stop trying to cover railway strikes/lockouts in the print version of the paper until the situation is completely settled.
Now, we cover these fluid stories online and run a note on the front page directing readers to our website for up-to-date coverage.
Still, our readers continue to expect a certain degree of timeliness in our coverage of stories that matter to them.
The tariff situation is one such example.
Trying to keep up to the will-he-or-won’t-he shenanigans of the U.S. president has been particularly difficult.
The first deadline for Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports was his inauguration day, Jan. 20.
That was a Monday, our production day, and several stories had to be rewritten late in the day when the tariffs were postponed at the 11th hour.
The new deadline was Feb. 4, which was Tuesday, one day after our production deadline. We had stories ready to go saying the tariffs were on, only to have to rewrite them at the last minute on Monday afternoon when Trump again changed his mind.
The next deadline was March 4, again a Tuesday, and some stories to that effect had already made it onto pages before the tariffs were rescinded on Thursday and postponed until April 1.
Stories were again rewritten and new ones were planned around the new deadline.
I went into the weekend confident our plan was sound, only to hear on Saturday about the Chinese tariffs.
Several stories already in the paper alluded to threatened Chinese tariffs, and yet again, they had to be rewritten and space found for new stories that weren’t even on our radar Friday afternoon.
Editing a weekly newspaper has never been such a wild ride, and the rollercoaster doesn’t seem to be coming to a stop anytime soon.
Bruce Dyck is news editor of the Western Producer.
