Special Pub

I work for a weekly business newspaper. Deadlines are usually on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we go to press on Thursdays. Friday is a day to have story meetings, line things up for the next week, and then start cranking out the next three or four stories. It's a good cycle.

Most of our readers get everything on Monday, and we also post breaking news briefs and short stories on our website. (AP style says "Web site," but that's retarded. I think we can upgrade to one word now, Associated Press. This new-fangled technology of the Intertubes is awfully scary, I know, but seriously.)

So we have a nice little schedule going, but you knew there was a catch, right?

Special publications bring fear into my heart. I cannot express how much I hate these things. We do about two dozen special publications a year, and these are magazines that we insert into the normal newspaper or, rarely, special editions of the newspaper itself. These magazines--with focuses on scientific research, or energy, or real estate, or whatever--will take a good week and make it tailspin out of control.

The publications have their use, don't get me wrong. They let us do longer stories about things that we wouldn't normally cover in the weekly paper, and if managed correctly and set out into a good economy, they can provide additional revenue through ad sales.

The problem is that since the economy is fairly crappy (and REALLY crappy if you're in the newspaper world), special publications aren't as productive anymore. We used to have a decent stable of freelancers who would do the majority of the articles. Then our newspaper's budget started not being so great, and we have to make some cutbacks. Now those of us who are full-time reporters are having the handle the articles, on top of our usual weekly quota.

I shouldn't complain. I still have a job, which is more than I can say for a lot of reporters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. All of the dailies are having buyouts and cuts. But now I have additional work to do in areas that I don't understand or sometimes even care about. Of course, I guess that's the problem with all newspapers right now. How do you put out just as much content with significantly fewer people?

I feel sorry for people at bigger papers, but I still hate the damn special pubs.