Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

When we first made the decision to reduce our publication dates to twice a week, one of the questions we often heard was how it might affect the timing of our coverage in regards to when stories might hit the public.

As a daily through the years, readers were used to reading about events in the next issue of the Herald the following day, however, the most obvious repercussion of not printing daily was that publishing a story the next day wasn’t a viable option.

Print wise, people would have to wait a couple days before they could read about it in the paper, unless they had online access to the Herald’s website.

This is a burgeoning era for newspapers as many are having to shift their focus to more of a digital footprint. Obviously, we want to get news to you as soon as possible, and the web provides an almost real-time option to get stories to the public fast.

It also gives us the option to provide a narrative flow, depending on the importance of the story, that starts with a brief two or three sentence alert or breaking news, that can be followed up on and updated as time moves forward. This holds through with follow-up stories if required.

Still, while online publishing allows for a certain fluidity in terms of timely news coverage, we can’t forget about the print edition and the many readers we still have faithfully turning our pages.

So what contributes to the timing of publishing a story?

Broadly speaking, the story itself often is the determining factor. Breaking news finds publication online as soon as we can get it there. These can include subjects such as weather-related events, emergencies, political news, milestone moments and major announcements just to name a few.

Take the flooding that occurred this past June. Due to the direct impact on the area, we were reporting on this event as soon as we could and updating when there was something new. This was not an event that could wait until a printed edition.

At the same time, those stories that normally can wait until a printed edition to come out tend to lie more on the feature side of things. A larger story that we’ve worked on throughout the week — and that normally holds down our main story slot on the front — is an example of a story that can wait. While there is plenty of news throughout the week that makes it online first, these types of stories give readers something fresh to look forward to.

Another key determining factor of when a story goes online vs. in print is the timeliness. This really applies to upcoming events and sports stories. A basketball, football or volleyball game story will get posted immediately online afterwards because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to hold onto a game story for three, four days, especially as there are games in between when it happens and when it runs.

Likewise, the digital format works well for upcoming events. The general rule of thumb is try to print a story about a week out from the event so as to keep it fresh in people’s minds, but sometimes that doesn’t work out in the paper, so being able to get it online is a remedy to that. Also, it gets the story a little extra boost because it’s effectively pushing through in two different areas and oftentimes reaching two different segments of the population.

Having to go down to two days a week would have been very different 20 years ago, but because we have the digital option we have currently — whether that’s our website, Facebook or Twitter — it allows us to control and adapt to situations dependent on when we publicize the story.