How your city's newspaper handled the fatal shootings in Dallas?

San Antonio AND Houston!

 

Same here. I was actually stunned it was the lead story given what I have experienced with deadlines.

 

Small West Coast local daily here with page-out deadline at 11:45, so we didn't have as much of a problem here, although I work with a Regional Design Center, so that always makes things a little harder than it could be.
We already had a story on the previous police shootings in La. and Minn. as a top rail, and fortunately I caught the Dallas thing early on and soon realized it would be A1. Put it on that top rail, replacing the earlier story and was able to wait for the most recent version.
For Saturday's paper, we did a four-story centerpiece package with some other related stories inside. Through happenstance, we ended up with a lot of extra jump space (which isn't common at this shop) so I was happy we were able to get everything in without having to slash stories.

 

Small daily in the Pacific Northwest ... kept all the local stuff (include an absolute clunker local business sold/advertorial story) on A1 and blew out the Dallas coverage on A3.

Not the proudest day in Podunk Press history. Hey, I just make the doughnuts ...

Our reporters did get several "localization" stories for Saturday's A1, at least.

 

I have no doubt the paper here that led with it already had a lead in place on the two police shootings. Zero doubt.

 

Medium-sized daily in the Upper Midwest:

We had a short item on A2. Final deadline for both sports and news is 11:30, but I don't think we had much useful content from Reuters by that time. Also, we were still chasing the Castile shooting (which broke in our region on or after deadline the day before) and had some of the best local art I've seen in my 11 months working here (air show precede - Thunderbird with contrails at Mach 0.9). Would have been very tough to tear up the front an hour before deadline for a story that was still developing (well, at least it was to our wire service).

 

They have a printing contract with Hearst to print the live sections in San Antonio. They only rarely adjust the deadline by an hour or so for known events, such as an election. Cox put out two digital extras on Friday.

 

You bring up a good point. The gap between something breaking on Twitter, websites, etc. and when AP or your wire service moves a usable story can be several hours.

Even in the Pacific time zone (11 p.m. deadline), I had to cobble together a couple different AP stories at the last possible moment to get the freshest Dallas news and Minnesota info in one story. The AP writethru was awful and packed full of errors/repeated paragraphs.

 

Sunday's front in Dallas:

 

This was a time to adjust the deadline.

I know we're in a digital world. But not everyone is there. We still need to provide this information. Deadline at 8:30 to save money is disgraceful.

 

Austin: We need to adjust deadlines.

San Antonio: Sorry, we have our own newspaper to worry about. Get it in by 8:30, or you readers can get their newspaper around noon.

It's not as easy as "this is a time to adjust your deadline," especially when there isn't a defined time that your story was going to receive clarity or an ending.

 

I get the idea, and the execution is fine. But it's a little creepy.