The hype behind the headlines
As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, I don't yet know the outcome of the most dangerous week this Labour government has faced. Deadlines are a fact of life for newspapers, and hugely affect the news we see every day. Most big papers go to press between 7pm and 9.30pm every night, and go through several editions on a normal run, until early in the morning. The earliest editions printed are those sent to far flung parts of the country, and final editions are those sold in, or very close to, London.
On some newspapers, it is possible to see which edition you are buying by looking at the top corner - The Times, for example, usually gets its '2W' edition to Oxford, the penultimate printing of the night. On the Guardian front page, you can tell the edition from the number of stars.
Fixed deadlines have always influenced the way newspapers operate, and most newspapers have the resources to print a special edition. Even regional newspapers sometimes do this - most locals covered the result of the Soham trial in special early evening editions, managing to pre-empt the nationals.
For London's papers, there is the real possibility that an amazing story will come in after deadline. Night Editors cover the Home and Foreign desks, and copytasters will monitor the 'wires' - Reuters, Press Association and others - around the clock. If a story comes in, the editor has to make a snap decision whether or not to alter the next edition to include it. This might include resetting the whole front page, and printing a story with such short notice means there is always a risk that the available facts are blurry or even wholly inaccurate. On the other hand, a big paper cannot afford to pass on a story, only to see it splashed across a rival's front page. As well as chance sales, the rival might also pick up the paper's regular customers, who could then lose brand loyalty.
The other difficulty of early editions is that not all of them will be safely locked on to lorries and dispatched to the regions. Some have to be put in newsstands in London, to catch evening customers. For tabloids particularly, there is great fear that if another paper sees an amazing scoop in the early edition of around 11pm, they will produce a rip-off in their own later editions. So tabloids often withhold a juicy story until later in the evening.
Of course, front pages sometimes change due to outside pressure. The Sun's famous 'Gotcha!' headline on the sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands war was changed in later editions amid fears that over 1000 people had lost their lives. Similarly, last year's sympathetic 'Bonkers Bruno Banged Up' caused such outrage in the early hours that it was later changed to 'Sad Bruno in Mental Home'.
Of course, it isn't just the leading stories that change over the editions - spelling mistakes will be silently corrected, extra comment and analysis might be added - but it's strange to think that all these other editions exist, mostly without our knowledge, giving a completely different version of the day's events.
29th Jan 2004