There was a time when September, October, and early November were not just election seasons but collection seasons. On copy desks at newspapers across the country, editors began squirreling away wire stories from every cranny of the globe. They had to be what's known as "evergreen" – meaning they wouldn't be outrun by near-future events. They had to be timeless features, and the longer, the better. It was all in preparation for the biggest newspaper of the year, the Thanksgiving Day edition. Advertising sales dictate the size of newspapers, and on Thanksgiving so many retailers wanted to buy space that that wasn't enough contemporary news to wrap around all the ads. So copy editors started saving all those wire stories that normally no one would put in the paper. Not so today. The advertisers still want to be in the paper on Thanksgiving. But it's all "inserts" – the slick annoyances (for me, anyway) that hide the newsprint sections. So the accompanying photo is what those of us in Seattle were greeted with yesterday. Click to enlarge!
The ultimate dead-tree edition
There was a time when September, October, and early November were not just election seasons but collection seasons. On copy desks at newspapers across the country, editors began squirreling away wire stories from every cranny of the globe. They had to be what's known as "evergreen" – meaning they wouldn't be outrun by near-future events. They had to be timeless features, and the longer, the better.
Ads accompanying <i>The Seattle Times</i> on Nov. 22, 2007.
There was a time when September, October, and early November were not just election seasons but collection seasons. On copy desks at newspapers across the country, editors began squirreling away wire stories from every cranny of the globe. They had to be what's known as "evergreen" – meaning they wouldn't be outrun by near-future events. They had to be timeless features, and the longer, the better.
