Print has a role in national championship

Who says print new can't keep up? I was astounded this morning to pick up the Raleigh News & Observer and find the front page dominated by the results of the NCAA men's basketball championship game and the Sports section wrapped in an eight-page tribute to Duke's championship. I knew the game ended long after my bedtime, around 11:30 or so, and well past the deadline for the N&O edition that is trucked 50 miles to Wilson to be tossed in my driveway. But there it was, the big news of the day for many sports fans, delivered to doorsteps despite what must have seemed like impossibly tight deadlines.

Few people who have not worked for a newspaper can appreciate the amount of work and anxiety that goes into getting a paper out. When events are transpiring right on deadline, or right after deadline, editors and publishers have to make some tough decisions: Do we hold for the news, pushing back deadlines and forcing press crews and delivery personnel to work later with more rushing and tension, or do we stick with the proven and familiar deadlines and hope to report the news a day late in the next edition? It's always a tough call that happens more often than most readers imagine.

When I was editing The Wilson Daily Times, we decided to postpone our deadline until President George H.W. Bush was sworn in at noon — an hour past our final deadline. We waited for the photo of the swearing in until well past noon, and the circulation department fumed. In retrospect, it was an unwise decision. About a year later, we begged Atlantic Christian College to release its new name to the newspaper just a few minutes before the official declaration at 11:30 (or thereabouts). We promised to keep the name secret until after the announcement, and we could not get the name into print (because pages aren't built and presses aren't run instantaneously) until after the announcement, anyway. College officials refused to help us out, and we decided not to hold up the paper for their announcement. We reported the celebration of the name "Barton" a day later.

So the N&O's decision to hold a couple of hours for the championship last night was not an easy one. Some overtime, jangled nerves and unkind words were probably involved. It was a tough decision but a smart one, a decision that affirms the role of print journalism in an age of instantaneous communication. Although die-hard basketball fans stayed up late to watch the nail-biter on TV, they still hungered for the fine details that only the newspaper could provide. I was reminded of the late Vermont Royster's comments about his worries that upstart television might make newspapers obsolete. It was the late 1940s, and Princess Elizabeth of Britain was marrying Philip Mountbatten. Royster's two daughters watched the filmed ceremony on the new-fangled video box, and their father worried about what their fascination would mean for his print journalism career. Then he saw his daughters' excitement again as they fought over the morning newspaper with its detailed descriptions of the fuzzy, black-and-white images they had just seen. Print would survive after all, he surmised.

Even in a video world, print has a solid place. The N&O decision-makers and sports fans know it. Now someone just has to convince advertisers, who have been abandoning print for "new media."