From the Publisher: Deadlines … I always meet them

I’m going to get into the weeds of the publishing business. This may not be of interest to everyone who reads this column, but it should be relevant because it’s about something everyone encounters from time to time: deadlines.

I’ve been in the newspaper—and now the publishing—business since my college days. Actually, even before that.

I was editor of my high school newspaper and worked on my college newspapers. My college paper was a daily, which meant I had deadlines pretty much every day.

While in college, I got a job at the San Diego Union as a clerk in the sports department. The job mostly involved taking calls from high school coaches and writing short articles for publication in the next morning’s newspaper.

It was the perfect training ground for working on deadlines. Calls started coming in around 9 p.m., and our first deadline was 10 p.m. There wasn’t much time to put together a roundup of stories.

After graduating, I went to work at my hometown newspaper and eventually became sports editor. Again, there was plenty of deadline pressure. Then I moved to Las Vegas to work in the sports department at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve worked for all kinds of publications. In all that time, I’ve never missed a deadline to send a newspaper to the printer.

This publication is monthly, so by itself it’s a fairly manageable deadline. But I also have deadlines for my newspaper in Mesquite, along with two others I work on in Sun City Summerlin and Sun City Anthem.

Fortunately, the deadlines for these various publications are spread throughout the month. When I finish one, I can move on to the next.

Speaking of deadlines, I have to fess up to a mistake in this issue. On the cover, I refer to Amber Messner as Amber Milholm. In the article on Page 6, her name is correct.

How come I couldn’t fix it on the cover? Well, the cover section deadline was three days earlier than the inside pages because it’s printed on glossy paper. By the time I noticed the error, it was too late to make the change.

—Kirk Kern