Erie Times-News early deadline on H.S. football nights

I was wondering if anyone could confirm a rumor I heard ... the Erie Times-News is now printed offsite and someone told me they have to be off the floor at 9:30 p.m. during high school football season. I can't imagine this is true. Can someone confirm or deny this?

 

If it's true, they can run lots of halftime scores.

 

I freelanced for a paper that had a 10:30 deadline for stories, and I thought that was awful. If this is true, I would just put all the coverage online.

 

Not true. Our deadlines have been altered because of the company's decision to move to an off-site printer, but football Fridays will have a midnight press start. The earliest we're off the floor is 10:05 p.m. Saturdays because of the extra time needed to stuff and deliver the Sunday section.

 

The last paper I freelanced for a few years ago changed its HS fball deadlines to 10 p.m. I was already thinking of dropping out, but that gave me a real excuse for doing it. Sports editor moved on a couple months later. Don't know what their situation is now, but that was just stupid. Most games I went to ended between 9:30 and 9:45, so the 10 p.m. deadline was ridiculous.

 

We start season with a midnight page deadline due to heat-related 7:30 p.m. kickoffs and mandated heat breaks.

Works OK.

We'll move that back to 11:45 in October.

 

Some games are just entering the fourth quarter at 10 p.m. here, where everyone almost uniformly runs a spread offense.

Some schools have elected to move kickoff times back to 7 p.m. because games are running long.

 

Someone needs to run the Veer offense and kick the living crap out of those wimpy spread teams.

 

You root for what I was lucky enough to have in my game last week -- a 35-0 shutout in which the clock ran continuously for the last 18:45. Over at 9:36, at a McDonald's less than 30 mins. later and out of there before the 11 p.m. deadline. I suspect I won't be that lucky every Friday night, but one can always hope.

 

We're working with an 11 p.m. deadline.

Kickoffs used to be at 7:30 p.m. in our area (some still are at schools on the other side of town)...but our area schools shifted up to 7 p.m. starts about 5 years ago and that extra half-hour makes a world of difference.

 

We normally have a 10 p.m. deadline, but we will give some wiggle room during football. We usually just do a down-and-dirty gamer of about 250 words. We then follow up with an in-depth wrap up in the following edition. We've gotten the routine down to the point that it's hardly an issue.

 

I'm hearing rumblings that the Utica, NY, Observer-Dispatch has 9:30ish deadlines this fall. I think they're printed down near Binghamton and need to be off the press before the more-local papers are serviced.