the kicker

Deadline NYT

September 23, 2009

In a cost-saving measure, The New York Times is moving up the deadline for its Monday-through-Saturday papers by half an hour. Managing editor John Geddes explains the move in a memo sent to NYT staff earlier today:

To the staff,



On Sunday, Oct 18th, we’ll be moving the deadline for our first national edition to 9:00 pm from 9:30 for our Monday through Saturday papers.



We’re doing this to save money. By closing 30 minutes earlier we’ll be able to include papers printed in some of our national sites in shipments made by other publishers to distant markets. That means we can drop other, more costly NYT-only transportation arrangements. By piggybacking our shipments in these markets, we expect to save a significant amount of money and reach even more cities earlier .



Naturally there’ll be some rare nights when the earlier national deadlines and the timing of major news events collide. In those cases, we will, as we’ve done in the past, make adjustments to insure that readers of the early edition don’t miss the news.



We’re not making any changes in any of our other deadlines. That said, the earlier national deadline will mean that we will need to adjust some of our staffing and other schedules. We will also need to keep the gains we’ve made on our copy-flow progress by enforcing filing deadlines and getting stories into the editing pipeline efficiently.



Thanks,



John

[h/t Nieman Lab]

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.