Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. 38 Journalism: Publishing Across Media For the Record Deadlines, Spikes and Being Put to Bed Historically, morning newspapers had a long news cycle—staffers had a full day to gather news and write stories before the paper was published. They “put the paper to bed” sometime around midnight. Everything had to be finalized and sent to the typesetters and then to the printing presses by 12:00 if the paper was to be on the customers’ doorsteps or in the newsstands by 6:00 a.m. Any story received after midnight would go into the following edition or be spiked—literally impaled on a spike—if it was not fit to print or if it would be stale by the following day. A deadline was really a deadline, a term that comes from an Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War. If a man crossed a marked boundary—the deadline—he was shot dead. That is how journalists regard deadlines. Afternoon papers in large cities could have much shorter news cycles, especially when several papers competed for the penny a New Yorker paid for each paper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. You may have seen old movies that show newsboys on city streets calling out the latest headlines. Each paper wanted to be first with the news, as an important story developed, a new edition of the front page would be written and a new plate made in the composing room to print it. This was sometimes done as often as every 20 minutes. Papers could go through five or six editions when a developing story was on the front page. Radio news broadcasts also may have short news cycles. All-news stations (“all news, all the time”) may have two news cycles in an hour. Several boast “You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.” Other stations broadcast news at the “top of the hour”—every hour on the hour. These stations can rewrite their lead stories for each broadcast as soon as they receive new information, and they break into their other programming when something important comes across the wire—from the wire services. Though news stations may employ reporters, especially for local coverage, many stories come from one of the wire services, such as Reuters, Associated Press (AP) or United Press International (UPI). The wire was originally a telegraph wire. Now it is the Internet. Internet-based news sites and microblogging sites make the news cycle so short it is almost instantaneous, with several reports a minute coming in from scenes of natural disasters, war zones, political conventions, the Olympics or the Oscars or Emmys.