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11 months in, the DMG is still adjusting to new schedule

We at the Daily Mining Gazette are entering our 11th month as a paper that prints at night as opposed to one that prints in the late morning/early afternoon. We fully admit, it has been a bumpy ride.

This move was made, in part, to help save the paper money, and also made, in part, to meet the delivery deadlines of the U.S. Postal Service.

Our coordination with the USPS is the main reason why we no longer have papers on national holidays, since the mail is not delivered on those days. After 11 months of hearing your frustrations at our print schedule, we are in the early stages of discussion on how we can alleviate some of those problems moving forward, but are not ready to implement those changes yet.

This transition has also meant a fundamental change in our deadlines and has affected, as you have definitely noticed by now, how we cover news events.

Under our previous schedule, if one of our writers covered a meeting that started at say 5 or 7 p.m., they would have time to get home, write the story and file it before our editors sat down at 6 a.m. and started putting the stories on the pages. Our print deadline was in the 10:30-11 a.m. range, so that was plenty of time to get stories written.

Under our new schedule, our deadline for finished news pages is about at the same time our writers are just sitting down to write up a story based on an evening meeting or event they just covered. That makes it impossible to get the story done and into the following morning’s paper.

That change alone makes it very hard to get news out immediately, leaving you, the reader, to have to wait for your story on the latest on the Houghton waterfront development or the latest on what is happening with the Hancock school system. However, we also believe this gives our writers a chance to write a stronger story.

We admit this is our challenge as we work hard to give you, the reader, the most timely news we can.

The other major problem with the new early deadline is that by the time we are ready to have pages given a final look over, we do not have extra sets of eyes in the office to read over the paper as we used to. This has led to mistakes like repeat stories, cutoff stories, spelling errors.

We like to believe that we are improving in those areas over the past two months or so, but we also fully admit we still have a long way to go in getting used to our new deadlines.

Our sports deadline is three hours after our news deadline, which is more in line with our old deadlines, so they can get news out in a more timely fashion. We know our sports readers really appreciate this and we are proud of how hard our sports team works to make it happen.

We at the Daily Mining Gazette thank you for your continued patience as we continue to adjust and work as hard as we can to provide you with news that is both timely and accurate. We also ask that you continue to bear with us as we make adjustments in how we present our product to you.

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