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A little housecleaning

| November 15, 2007 12:00 AM

A little off the top - By Ethan Smith

This promises to be the most boring, but informative, column I've ever written, except for the one I did about how to survive an IRS audit using only your toothbrush.

But when it comes to helping you as a reader sometimes a little information goes a long way, and that's what this column is about.

Mondays

Like most of you, Monday is the start of a busy work week for us, but it's also the most important day to get stories finished. Our deadline for submissions (community notes, letters to the editor, etc.) is Mondays at noon.

The reason we have this deadline is to format, edit and otherwise prepare whatever it is you are turning in, especially if we have to type it in from scratch. "But it's only a short letter!" you say. It's not one letter to the editor or obituary or community note — it's often 10 or more in each category, all flooding in at the last minute, hence our deadline.

Tuesdays

Tuesdays are our deadline and layout days — the day we put the paper together. There is the misconception that because we come out on Thursdays, Wednesdays must be our busy day, but that's not the case. The paper is printed early Wednesday morning so it can be distributed to post offices throughout the county that day so that it's in your mailbox Thursday morning.

Therefore, events that happen on Wednesday are not included in that week's paper, unfortunately.

That also makes covering Tuesday's events quite a challenge. If there's something significant happening on a Tuesday, such as a hearing on the Wal-Mart supercenter, we make every effort to cover that and hold a spot in the paper, but if it's not as time-sensitive, we will generally hold it until next week's paper.

Sports events held on Tuesdays are a challenge. If it's a home game, we make our best effort to get those results in that week — it doesn't do much good to read about it nine days later — but if it's an away game it's more difficult to reach coaches on the road.

Basically, for every hour one reporter is out of the office covering something Tuesday, it's one hour that the paper gets finished later, so we prioritize accordingly.

We will make every effort to follow up with a story for next week if we can't get it in that week's paper. That way we can also spend more time on it instead of rushing to get it in the paper, increasing the chances for mistakes.

Birth announcements

We're proud to be one of the only newspapers in the entire state of Montana that prints birth announcements for local families, including the baby's picture, and names of all relatives, for free. While many papers will print a baby's name or just the parents' name, or charge the hospitals to run an ad featuring only the baby's picture and birth date, we know that it means a lot to local families that we provide this service complete with everyone's name and a picture.

Having said that, birth announcements are often the source of some of the angriest phone calls I receive. The local hospitals make every effort to decipher everyone's handwriting, including calling out-of-state relatives to try to verify the spelling of their name, but we rely on you to fill out the forms correctly and with legible handwriting.

If you see a misspelled name, there's about a 50 percent chance that your family member misspelled it on the birth announcement form, and a 45 percent chance that the hospital staff couldn't read your handwriting. The hospital staff who compiles these for us do occasionally make mistakes, as do we — the other 5 percent — and if so, we're happy to re-run the corrected version as soon as possible.

If your baby is born at Community Medical Center in Missoula, you need to submit that information to us, but we can pull the picture off of Community's website.

Please note that the hospitals submit birth announcements in a timely manner, but not necessarily the day your baby is born, so it's unlikely that a birth announcement will appear in the next issue following the birth. We generally have at least a two-week lag time.

Because we don't charge for birth announcements, we run these on a "space available" basis, meaning that if we have a week with an extraordinarily large amount of obituaries or other time-sensitive material that has to go in that week, we can't always print 100 percent of the birth announcements we have waiting in the queue. Coupled with the fact that both local hospitals are experiencing record births this year, we try to juggle the amount of birth announcements coming in each week with other things that also need to go into the paper.

If we charged for birth announcements, this wouldn't be a problem — we'd run them like a paid advertisement — and there are times when we revisit this issue, especially after a verbally abusive phone call over a mistake we didn't make, but we think the current system is pretty good, all things considered.

Weddings and engagements

We also like putting those in the paper at no charge because we know it means a lot to the couples involved, but please try to turn those in a few weeks in advance. We usually run them once every few weeks, prioritized by how soon the wedding is or was. Please note, we prefer not to have the engagement notice used as your mass wedding invitation, and will edit accordingly.

Obituaries

We also publish all obituaries at no charge for any local families, regardless of how long the person lived here or how long ago it was. If someone passes away over the weekend, and the family doesn't have time to finish the obituary before our deadline, we put a death notification in that at least tells friends and family about when the funeral is, and what funeral home is responsible for arrangements, so that they can find out about the service.

The local funeral homes do a great job of helping us with obituaries in what is a very trying time for families, and we make every effort to get that obituary in that week's paper due to the significance of the situation, up to and including pulling other articles (or birth announcements) on a Tuesday afternoon.

E-mail

E-mail is the best way to submit something, because it's the easiest way for us to format the item to get it ready to print, especially if you are running late for our Monday deadline. An e-mailed letter to the editor sent Monday afternoon has a much better chance of making it into the paper than a handwritten one simply because we don't have to re-type it from scratch.

Of course, we'll take your faxes and handwritten submissions, too. (I often feel that people who hand-write a letter to the editor feel more strongly about the topic than someone who e-mails one, but that's obviously not always the case.) You can e-mail items to newsdesk@leaderadvertiser.com or editor@leaderadvertiser.com

Letters to the editor

I love letters to the editor because it shows people are reading the paper and getting actively involved in their local news. Earlier this year, we decided to raise the word limit to 500, in consideration of the fact that the prior word limit, 350, seemed to put too much constraint on people's opinion.

Despite raising the limit, we still get the 800, 1,100 and 1,300 word manifestos. It's nothing personal, but we will cut it. The problem is — and this is a challenge I face every week — is that if we allow one person to slide, we have to let everyone.

Often, people will submit their opinions with claims that we need to verify. If so, we will hold your letter until we've verified that information, rather than be guilty of spreading misinformation. That's one primary reason we ask for your phone number (which won't be printed). We continually have a problem with people submitting letters with no phone number.

We also make judgments as to the appropriateness of running letters. If we decide not to run your letter, I'd like to take the time to follow up with you and explain why, but we can't do that unless you include your phone number.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions about our policies, e-mail me or call me at 883-4343. Usually, if one person calls to ask, that means 20 other people are wondering the same thing. I like using this space to clarify things, speak my mind, and address reader concerns. That's what I'm here for.

That, and your aunt needs someone to yell at when you misspell her name on the birth announcement.