Lately I’ve seen\/heard a lot of discussion about deadlines – and it seems that they are\u00a0often\u00a0misunderstood.\u00a0 Fortunately, I am often misunderstood, and I misunderstand most things… so it seems perfect I should write a blog post about this.<\/p>\n
You might have heard of newspapers.\u00a0 They used to have these things where\u00a0you could read news that was printed on paper – thus “newspaper”.<\/p>\n
In my teens (in the late 1960’s) I had a night job as a “Flyboy” and printer’s assistant for a small newspaper printer who had their own web press (a web press is a huge machine\u00a0where you put in\u00a01-ton\u00a0rolls of paper at\u00a0one end and output printed and folded\u00a0newspapers at the other end).<\/p>\n
What’s a flyboy? It is a boy who stands at the “output” end of the press and picks up an arm-full of\u00a0newspapers as they come off the press, quickly “jogs” them into a neat stack, and bundles and ties\u00a0them on a bundler\/tier.\u00a0\u00a0“Fly” because the papers\u00a0“fly off the press”,\u00a0“Boy” because no reasonable adult would take this job\u00a0unless they had no other choice.<\/p>\n
Besides being a flyboy and a printer’s assistant, I also would do typesetting for\u00a0some of the less important content, and operate smaller presses to print\u00a0advertising flyers that get “stuffed” into the papers at some point, and help run the cameras and to do various layout, stripping, and other tasks.\u00a0 Most of this stuff is now considered a “dying trade”. And good riddance, I suppose, but I loved it – it seems I always loved books, printing, machines, noise, lettering, typesetting, doing stuff, craft, high skills, hand work, hard work, and late night radio. \u00a0Especially the shipping reports from England that come on at 2:00 am PST.<\/p>\n
The point is I don’t know a lot about the whole process except what I learned when I worked in this environment for about a year, and I think I remember just enough to make my point (hopefully).<\/p>\n
All of the following list of work must get done on a very tight schedule every day:<\/p>\n
There are a LOT of deadlines in there – and they ALL HAVE MEANING.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, I’ve left out a lot of details just to keep this post small enough to fit on the Internet.\u00a0 Also, a number of these things happen “in parallel” – a story can be “gathered”, written about, and\u00a0edited while other stories are at different stages of “completion” and still all get into the same daily paper.<\/p>\n
So I am going to talk about the classic “Printers Deadline”.<\/p>\n
At least where I worked, we had a hard deadline.\u00a0 To get the paper out to the “marketplace”, the trucks must leave sufficiently early before traffic starts so the papers can be where they need to be when people want to buy them.\u00a0 That’s the business. So – the hard deadline is: The press must start early enough to start putting newspapers into trucks so they can leave on time.\u00a0 It is a complex dance with a lot of variables.<\/p>\n
To do this, each step along the way has a specific deadline: It’s the time\u00a0all\u00a0items for this step MUST BE DONE with enough time to do all the following steps and still be on the press when printing starts.<\/p>\n
The bottom line: if\u00a0a story isn’t ready and “on the press” when the press starts printing, it is NOT going to be in the newspaper (there are ways around this, but that’s the general idea).\u00a0 That is a hard deadline.\u00a0 A lot of things can be easily changed right up until that minute.\u00a0 After that, it is costly in both time and money to make changes.<\/p>\n
Sometimes someone will yell “Stop the Presses”, like you see in the movies – but that is rare.\u00a0 There are occasional “Dewey Defeats Truman” mess-ups.<\/p>\n
Real deadlines exist. When they do exist, we need a system or method in place to deal with them so we have a reasonable chance for success.\u00a0 In the newspaper business they have the deadline thing figured out.\u00a0 The deadline is obvious. Some people say this is where the term “deadline”\u00a0was\u00a0invented.\u00a0 By the way, the newspaper industry has\u00a0bigger problems than deadlines\u00a0nowadays, or maybe it’s a different kind of “deadline”,\u00a0and we can talk about that some other day.<\/p>\n
There are a number of things\u00a0the newspaper publishers have found work nicely\u00a0to\u00a0allow for these serious deadlines.<\/p>\n
News items have different schedules and different deadlines based on the nature of the content – a garden page item might take weeks to write, photograph, illustrate, layout, etc – and a hard news item often\u00a0has at most about a day and sometimes as little as an hour to go from “this just in” to “press-ready”.\u00a0 Almost any feature can be edited to reduce its size, increase its size, or rearranged to fit the space on a page.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they “stop the presses” and re-set one of the plates to change or add content.\u00a0 Also sometimes a “special edition” is needed to disseminate late breaking but important news.\u00a0 Sometimes a flysheet can be printed on another press to add content at the last minute.\u00a0 Lots of options.<\/p>\n
In other words – there are many practices they’ve innovated over the years to be able meet those deadlines and do the job of delivering\u00a0a sufficiently interesting and sell-able product.<\/p>\n
Well – this blog\u00a0is about software development, not the newspaper business.\u00a0 However, I think there are a few similarities.\u00a0 What do you think?\u00a0 You probably see other similarities, and a few differences between the newspaper business and computer programming. \u00a0Still, the newspaper model might have some use.<\/p>\n
Do you have deadlines??? Learn how to deal with it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lately I’ve seen\/heard a lot of discussion about deadlines – and it seems that they are\u00a0often\u00a0misunderstood.\u00a0 Fortunately, I am often misunderstood, and I misunderstand most things… so it seems perfect I should write a blog post about this. I Worked As A Flyboy At A Newspaper In My Teens – [you can skip this part] […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile-stuff","category-boring-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":513,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}