Late news and civil rights

In our increasingly instantaneous news cycle, the old-fashioned print newspaper has a few disadvantages that can be seen quite often. The biggest of all is the deadline.\nOne single issue of a newspaper takes massive amounts of preparation. Some stories and designs are worked on for months before they appear in a paper. It's an extensive process and it's one that starts all over when breaking news occurs.\nWhen that happeens, we are often faced with a decision: Do we scrap the front page we've been working on for so long, do we just alter the page slightly or do we run the page as it is?\nMonday night, we faced one of those decisions.\nRosa Parks, famed civil rights activist, died at 92. We ran a photo and headline on the front page to alert our audience about the news and ran a full story with another photo inside the newspaper. We received some criticism because people thought we should have run the story more prominently on the front page.\nIt wasn't on the Associated Press wire service, which we use for national and international news, until almost 10 p.m., and a full story wasn't posted until nearly 11 p.m.\nOur deadline for sending the newspaper to print is midnight. That is for everything to be written, designed, edited and sent to the printer. Stories can't come in at 11:59 p.m. and make it into the newspaper.\nPage designers can't design pages in only a few minutes, so with every story there has to be a cut-off point where we choose to run a story or not.\nWith Tuesday's front page, we were faced with a decision on how to cover Parks' death. Since we didn't have a full story until 11 p.m., which would give us less than an hour to alter our paper, we decided to put a "plus" on the front and put the full story elsewhere.\nWe felt our front page already had plenty of timely, student-oriented stories and that with another day, we could not just report on the death of Rosa Parks, but report on how it affects the IU community. That is exactly what we have on our front page today.\nIf you check online, most newspapers didn't have any mention of Rosa Parks in their early editions. Only major news sources like The New York Times were able to have staff-written stories on deadline, but those were most likely written years ago.\nIn an ideal world, we'd have local reaction in our paper right away, but deadlines often make that impossible. That is one aspect in which the Internet and TV news have print news beat and we need to adapt as a medium. One way we can compete with day-old news is by going into more analysis and commentary, which have done with our front page story today. We can also use our Web site to provide more complete coverage around-the-clock. Since it would be difficult to call local sources after midnight, we felt a local online update wasn't necessary and could wait until the next day's paper.\nSometimes, it takes time for us to gather sources and report on breaking stories, so we ask our readers to be patient. We won't ignore big news, but the dreaded deadline can delay our coverage.