How late at night would something major have to happen for it to not show up on the front page of, say, the New York Times the next morning?
Depends on how big it is.
Newspapers’ deadlines vary. The most obvious difference is that there are still some afternoon papers in the country. Their deadlines might be 11 a.m. or noon. Most papers, though, are morning papers. These papers’ deadlines vary based on many things – their circulation numbers (more papers to print means you’ve got to start earlier), their circulation area (papers being sent further away need to get off the press earlier than papers being sent only a mile or two), and so on.
But generally…it really does depend on the significance of the story, and the later it gets, the more significant the story must be to stop the presses and call back the trucks.
The Sago mine disaster earlier this year is a good example for how late-breaking news can be bad for the print media. “All 12 alive” was announced at midnight Eastern, while the correct “All but one dead” wasn’t officially announced until about 3 a.m. See the SDMB thread, particularly my post 47:
I question whether or not newspapers still “stop the presses.” Competition between newspapers in most cities today is almost non-existent and there is no way they can compete with TV and radio with fast breaking stories. So their claim to fame is that they present in-depth accounts of happenings.
I think now that the total press run is broken down into scheduled segments with changes being put in in the breaks between segments.
Stopping the presses and changing the front page on the old rotary presses wasn’t all that easy. The process was complex and time consuming and it’s probably just as fast to schedule breaks in the press run and make changes, if any, then.
When I was a kid, WQXR (a classical radio station owned by the New York Times) used to read the next day’s headlines at 9:30pm, so I assume that’s when the paper went to the presses, at least for the first edition.
Another article on the Sago mine news. It mentions that the NY Times’ presses stopped at 2:47 AM.
At the newspaper I work at, 4 p.m. is our deadline for the next day run, unless something really earth-shattering happens (well, not earth-shattering; a multiple-fatal car accident, a murder, something interesting locally or nationally). This is so that our page design people can figure out how much space the have to have for everything. Stuff doesn’t actually go to press until around midnight, 1 a.m. - our presses print a lot of different newspapers in the area, though, so the Nevada Appeal prints at about midnight.
~Tasha
Speaking as a design person…
While we’re certainly glad when story deadlines are met and things aren’t changed later on in the process, it’s generally fairly simple to find a space for something later on (especially if you’ve got an editor willing to cut down a few stories).
By way of example, our story deadline is 4 p.m. as well. One night, we got a fax announcing a new candidate for mayor – at around 9:30 p.m. Our color deadline to the press (the time we have to be completely finished with the front and back pages) is 10. We still managed to get it on the front page.
Photographer Thomas Franklin snapped the famous photo of three firemen raising the flag at Ground Zero and put it on the wire around 5 p.m. Eastern Time on 9/11. Only the West Coast papers had it in the 9/12 editions.
I can’t imagine that was a deadline issue…5 p.m. is VERY early for breaking news (city council meetings and such are regularly covered and they last until 9 p.m. at least).
There are several deadlines for several editions at most morning newspapers.
I’m going to overgeneralize, but think of this series as typical:
The earliest deadline is for papers that have to be placed on trucks and shipped out of town. News vendors may also get an early edition for late-night sales.
Subscribers get the next edition. There may be a differentiation between the edition for the most distant suburbs and the immediate city.
News vendors and street boxes get a last edition with the latest-breaking news for direct sale to customers in the morning. This will usually contain all the late night sports info as well.
The differences will normally be small, with the front page and the sports changing but everything else staying the same. Even when important stories break, the inside pages will often be the same with only a page or two of headlines being altered.
The New York Times and a few other newspapers do separate local and national editions as well. The “local” edition of the Times includes state news from the capital at Albany. This edition only goes out as far as the trucks can carry it overnight for morning sales. People in Rochester got hugely upset when the Times changed its distribution so that the local edition went no further west than Canandaigua and Rochester was relegated to the national edition without the state news. Needless to say, the national edition is put to bed well before the local edition.
Urghhhh…I mean in the 9/11 evening papers. Most papers carried it 9/12
Sportswriters like myself can’t meet those deadlines, since most games are played in the evenings. When I covered baseball my pieces would always get submitted after 10pm. I imagine, however, that the sports section is unique.
Theres a difference between expected and unexpected breaking news. With things like sports, you can generally do the page layouts and typesetting beforehand and just insert the text right before the print run. With something like 9/11, you need to redo the entire paper which takes much longer.