Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 2.3.
Monday wasn’t really Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, but the government has taken a tip from the church calendar and turned every holiday that isn’t on a Monday into a “moveable feast” so they can get three-day weekends. Since the Post uses a government agency called the U.S. Postal Service to distribute papers, we can’t give them the papers on those Mondays for Tuesday’s distribution. Instead, we have to give them the papers Friday, which means we have to print them the previous Thursday, which means you are now reading old news.
Heck, you’re always reading old news. Every newspaper writes its stuff the day before. You want up-to-the-second stuff, try TV, radio, and the Internet.
You can take two attitudes about the inability to write up-to-the-second stuff: you can let it eat you up (which is the fastest way to an ulcer outside of eating Cajun food); or you can relax, let the news come when it comes, and enjoy your job. Actually, those are stages every reporter goes through. Reporters struggle to get their stories in right now, and editors let the stuff get in when it gets in—and just for fun, we sometimes lean on the reporters’ deadlines a little and watch them go into a frenzy. Hey, you gotta take your fun where you can get it.
Jill’s new to the biz, but she's maturing to the second stage pretty quickly. You should have seen Jill a few months ago, when it was nearing deadline and I was calmly saying, “Don’t worry. The news will come. It always does.” She knows what I mean now. The issue's a bit thin this week because we didn’t have time to let it come, and hopefully that reminds you that we need your contributions to keep a-coming. If you’ve got something interesting, call me at 268-3420.
Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 9/16/2010. I had to announce a tighter-than-usual deadline for this issue because, as I said in the column, the Postal Service needed the paper published by Friday in order to distribute it on our usual Tuesday. Not many articles came in by our Thursday deadline, so it was a four-page issue, and light on news.