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We’re ramping up to one of the most intense periods during the year here at the paper – producing and delivering our pre-Thanksgiving issue, which includes the holiday guide section.
This became much more of an effort last year when we decided to send that issue of the paper to every address in the Rockbridge area. Between that and the copies mailed to subscribers outside of the area, we’ll be putting over 18,000 copies in the mail the night of Nov. 21-22.
This project involves every department and most every employee in writing the stories, selling the advertising, designing and laying out pages, and delivering all those copies to the post offices in our coverage area.
For the past several months, our advertising folks have been emailing, phoning and calling on businesses and organizations who have run in this issue in the past, or that we think would benefit from the coverage that this mass mailing provides. They will be even busier leading up to the advertising deadlines the week of Nov. 13.
For the advertisers wanting us to design their ads, our graphic artists will be creating appealing advertisements and submitting those to our customers for their approval.
Our circulation staff will be updating the number of deliverable mail addresses on each of 47 different carrier routes at the eleven local post offices we cover. From those totals, bundle sheets with those numbers for each route will have to be prepared. Those get sent by email to our printer, the Lynchburg News & Advance, for preparing properly counted bundles for each route.
The news staff is already getting press releases and emails with information on events happening during the holiday season. These will be written up and formatted for our page designer to place into the holiday guide pages.
Starting the Wednesday before the Big Day, the staff will also be working on the regular newspaper edition for Nov. 22. Government meetings will be covered and written up. Obituaries will be received and processed. High school sports contests will be photographed and reported upon. Display and classified advertising for the regular - nonholiday guide portion – of the newspaper will be sold, created and electronically stored for inclusion on the pages.
All the pieces begin to come together late in the week prior to the press deadline of 4 p.m. Tuesday. The holiday guide section has to be to the printer a day earlier on Monday, so its pages are laid out late the previous week. By Tuesday morning, the A and B sections of the paper are coming together, with the last front page stories going into the layout Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday evening, our Ford box truck and another rented truck will arrive at the printing plant in Lynchburg by around 6 p.m. The printing and bundling of almost 20,000 newspapers will take about four hours. If all goes well, the trucks will be rolling back over the mountains by 11 p.m. One truck will take all the papers destined for the Lexington post office, along with papers for our out of the area subscribers. The other truck will make stops at the south county post offices – Glasgow, Natural Bridge, Natural Bridge Station and Buena Vista, and then on up to the northern part of the county to make those deliveries. We should be done by 4 a.m., and in time for the mail carriers to begin getting the papers out on the routes Wednesday morning.
As you can see, this is a highly choreographed process with a lot of moving parts, but between our great staff, the talented folks in Lynchburg, and our dedicated local postal carriers, virtually every home in the Rockbridge area will have a copy of The News-Gazette, with the holiday guide, by the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving.
I thought you might be interested in what goes on behind the scenes to make this happen.
