Publisher's Point Of View
Robert Allan Hooftallen

Thursday is production day here and while from the outside it may not appear as though creating a weekly newspaper takes a whole bunch of work, believe me, it does.

There are now six of us who work full time on creating what you hold, but for much of the week, two of them are dedicated to running an increasingly-busy print shop. And one and a half of us has to run the businesses, which gouges another significant chunk of time away from production.

So by Thursday at noon, there's about 50 hours worth of work that needs done in half that time.

When you work on a deadline for a living, you develop an internal clock that gnaws at your gut with advancing intensity as the week progresses.

It's a cycle that never stops and if you can't deal with it, you need to ascertain that pretty quickly and find something else to do before you submit yourself to its relentless omni presence.

And most people are better off to admit early that weekly newspaper work is not for them- even if they have the abilities and talents it takes to do the work.

That's because that ticking clock is only pacified by a finished product ready at deadline time. And so the very nature of that cycle invites a "path of least resistance" mentality- a mindset that values finishing the product more than it values the finished product.

For a long time, I didn't know the difference because I, too, had become yet another victim of a moment in time, a deadline that was in charge of how I did things.

Our press deadline is Friday at 11 am. We make it about 20 percent of the time. The printers are friendly and accommodating until noon. We make that about 60 percent of the time. They are grouchy and a little reckless with production, if you know what I mean, if we make it by one. We do so about 95 percent of the time.

The printers want me dead the other five percent of the time and I don't blame them, frankly. I have ruined their Fridays so many times that I shouldn't even be fool enough to be reminding them here.

A bazillion things can occur that make us a little late, but it's almost exclusively my fault when we are really late. Most often, it's because I've obsessed half a night away working on something until it's done the way I want it. When that's the case, I am pretty selfish in how I view the deadline and others' schedules.

And while I detest it for owning me, I have to respect this stinking deadline; first because the people who print our paper have been nothing but good to me when the majority of printers in this business would have shut me off; and secondly, because it has a seriously detrimental impact on the business.

If I didn't believe in my vision of what weekly newspapers will be in the coming years, I would have given this up a year or two ago.

What makes a deadline is the ancient and expensive process of putting all these words, photographs and graphics on paper. You have to fit into that big, old noisy machine's schedule, as well as the schedule of the people who own it and run it because very few small newspapers have the ability to print their own newspapers.

Delivering the product on an expected schedule to the subscribers and vendors, of course, is ultimately what decides the print schedule. So how it is delivered is what will ultimately be the pen that spells the end of the deadline.

I wholly believe that the majority of newspapers will rely more heavily on their Internet business than they do their print business by 2010. I know this one will.

I see the day when this newspaper will publish news daily on the web, complete with live video and audio clips. I see the day when a town's newspaper will be its virtual world, a portal that hosts the links to literally every product, service and social activity the community has to offer.

But, as it stands, the print version still out-earns the electronic version. When that pendulum swings, customers will get more for less and weekly newspapers and their deadlines will be replaced by a product that can be produced and changed at any hour, from any place.