Putting out a newspaper, weekly or otherwise is a complicated matter.
On a daily basis, the editorial, advertising and production teams, work separately, come together to put together the product that you see in front of you.
All while facing a newspaper’s two biggest enemies – time and space. A newspaper, especially the editorial team is always under one deadline or another, some more stringent than others. Will there be enough content to fill this week’s issue and will it be done on time?
By and large the answer for us at the Barrhead Leader has been fortunately yes, on both counts.
There are even times when the Leader editorial staff, have had an excess of stories that we have not been able to run due to space, as has been the case for the last few weeks. Our newspaper, like most, invites people to submit letters, photographs and other contributions.
Unfortunately for the last number of weeks, because of space considerations we have not been able to put in a lot of these submissions. Right or wrong, when we have an excess of material to put into the paper, often one of the first casualties are Letters to the Editor (LTE) and other submissions.
So why are we bringing this up now? Recently the Leader received a LTE regarding a submission from their organization asking when their particular submission was going to run.
An editorial staff member suggested after reading the submission that it might be a better fit as an advertisement, but if they would rather it be a submission we would do our best, but because of the backlog of submissions it may be a while.
They then wrote a LTE criticizing the reporter, but because the lack of space and the submissions ahead of it, we haven’t been able to publish either of these submissions yet. Although we did send the submission to our sister publication, the Town and Country, in hopes that they could publish it, we thought it would be unfair to publish it ahead of earlier submissions. We want to make it clear that we are not avoiding criticism, so we are addressing it here.
It is true that from time to time when a reporter talks to someone about a possible story, we do occasionally suggest it would be a better fit as an advertisement. After all if it were not for advertising the editorial staff wouldn’t be able to bring you the stories that we do.
Recently, we have also had a request to put in more sports results for things like bowling, softball, etc.
So we ask you to continue to submit articles, scores and letters to the editor. While we can’t guarantee when or if they will be published, just like our own staff’s stories, we do value your contributions and we will make every effort to include them. Thank you.
