How did Bin Laden news affect pagination at your paper?

I don't work at a daily, so I wasn't in an office putting together a paper tonight, but I bet there are some interesting stories from some folks out there who had to shred Page 1A or more.

 

What's that site with all the newspaper layouts?

 

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp

 

I'm in the magazine business now, but Mrs. Hack works at a very large metro daily (for one more week, anyway). She was scheduled to leave at midnight tonight. Now she isn't. Her departure time is TBD ... I think the final edition is off the floor a little after 1 a.m. EDT, and I suspect there will be some chases.

She says she won't miss this aspect of the business.

 

Significant effect here, but we always go into any night with a Plan B.

Obviously the lead story. We're stitching together a longer story from AP too-short (so far) lead and some material from McClatchy.

Deadline in about 5 mins.

Thank goodness for Twitter, where we learned at 9 p.m. that something was afoot.

 

Thanks, Eagle.

 

I posted some general info on the main thread about tearing up A1 for this. I live for this shit. I wish every night was like this.

 

Three of our four news designers routinely get the paper done and leave between 9:30 and 10 on Sunday nights. Tonight, it just so happened that the one guy who doesn't leave early was here. He walked over around 10:30 tonight and said something was up, and he was able to move some things around and get about 8 inches of story into the paper before our deadline.

He offered to completely rebuild A-1 so this was the biggest thing we had on the page, but the publisher said no, and the 8-inch story would do for now.

I was kind of disappointed there was still someone here in news. Thought it would be cool to be the guy to break down the cover and create the bin Laden is dead page. That'd be a neat story to tell my kids someday.

 

Amen!

 

Lot of people will be buying newspapers in the morning.

 

For this reason, I'm surprised we're not hearing more of front pages being completely torn up.

 

In a world where many newspapers are no longer being printed on site (meaning you don't have control of when the press stops and starts) and copy desks are consolidated (meaning we're not tearing up 1A, we're tearing up three or five or six 1As), one guesses that the historical "oomph" of many of tomorrow's local newspapers is going to be greatly reduced.