How did Bin Laden news affect pagination at your paper?

As someone mentioned earlier, this is one of those times where deadline should be put aside for, gasp, news value. And, as a co-worker pointed out, this happened at a time when many people (especially the demographic we cater to) would have completely missed it, thus having it in the morning paper is perfect timing for a change.

 

I still haven't figured out what The State did (or didn't) do. Their e-edition includes a single Special Report page. Not sure if that's an e-edition only or not.

Here's what our front looked like at 10:30 p.m. (it never saw the light of day) and what actually hit the streets.



Deadlines? Positively obliterated. We've got a 10:50 first and a 12/12:20 final. Hit the button at about 12:50. Went with one edition.

 

Nice job not only on reworking the front, but getting a local story in, too.

 

Great work Mustard.

 

Here's the same thing from Raleigh.

 

Thanks for the kind words. There were a whole lot of folks doing a whole lot of kickass work all over our newsroom last night. And judging by some of the fronts we've all seen today, we weren't alone in that.

 

NYT

 

I think for me the more interesting question is how this affected people's inside pages. It's one thing to scrap a front page and redesign on the fly (Let's be honest, you can probably, if you had to, design a solid front page with this as a main story in about 30-45 minutes) but it's quite another to bump all of that news you did have on the front either off the page entirely or start it inside, not to mention include space for the jumps from the new stories you've just imported.

Our state's biggest daily clearly just scrapped whatever they had as the top-six story and jumped it inside somewhere, a decision I'm sure many other East Coast papers followed.

Me? I don't know how I would have reacted. But I would love the chance to try some day.

 

Everything originally jumped off our 1A to 2 and 3 with wire to fill it out. We basically crammed all of that content onto 2 and 3A and held all things Osama to the front.

 

We caught a huge break in that our front was chock full of holdable/killable elements.

-- Skybox. Dead.
-- Rail. Moved to a tiny strip across the bottom.
-- Lede story. Pope, which moved inside to the spot it was jumping to.
-- Centerpiece. Held a day and ran on the Local / State front.
-- Downpage. Held for a date TBD.

I would never say it was *easy*, but it could have been a lot harder. And it's nights like this one that I'm especially thankful for my years in sports. Because I figure if you can handle a West Texas football Friday, you can handle just about anything. And I'm sure that goes for plenty of other subjects in plenty of other places.

 

I'm more curious about what everyone did for Tuesday's paper. Sunday night was an exercise in scrambling for newspapers, and it showed what electronic media can do very well. I kinda felt like Tuesday was the day when newspapers could show off what they do best.

Our centerpiece was local reaction from politicians to locals who had lost loved ones on 9/11.

Inside, we dedicated two wire pages to OBL's death. We did a little bit of what happened (more details were available yesterday than Sunday night) and some retrospective stuff, but most of the rest of it was analysis of what it all means going forward.

Our editorial page also was dominated by reaction to the news.

Was this overkill (maybe a poor choice of words)? I don't think so. I felt like this was the biggest news since the 9/11 attacks. Were we fortunate to be able to clear out that much space? Probably, and we'll likely pay for it with truncated sections at the end of the month. But for me, I feel like it was worth it considering both what happened and how it happened.

 

Was there any fallout from the public?