Publishing puzzle

Assembling a community weekly newspaper is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are important. Without even one, the puzzle can't be completed. But at the same time, those pieces aren't exclusive to each week's puzzle. We do our best to put together the puzzle that we hope yields an accurate reflection of our community on a week-to-week basis. Most of the time, we have dozens of puzzle pieces left over that form the foundation of the next week's issue. We add in new pieces, reuse some others and once again finish the week with a completed puzzle. And we'll still have pieces left over…

Each week, we gather more news items than we have room to publish. We know this going in because our page counts vary and we need to be prepared for any number of possibilities. We generally publish 20, 24 or 28 pages. However many pages we publish, it's always in increments of four. Page counts are driven by advertising sales and we try to maintain a relatively even split between advertising and editorial content. So we overplan and overproduce. The byproduct is that things we cover and write and items that are submitted don't always publish the week they occur or were sent in.
Essentially, when we finish each week's issue, we usually have enough content leftover to build at least half of another paper-sometimes another whole issue. As a weekly paper with limited resources, that's a responsible way to plan. From a public-relations standpoint, it's problematic. Folks don't see their event or activity in the paper and wonder why.
When we're assembling the puzzle, we take into consideration any number of factors of which pieces we'll use, including timeliness, news value, impact and sustained relevance. Some items simply will have a longer shelf life than others. Some have to publish immediately because they promote upcoming events. Others are evergreen.
Another consideration is the size of the puzzle pieces and how many similar pieces we have. We aim for a healthy variety of elements in the paper, but also want to highlight certain events and activities with sufficient photos to properly convey a key community event. Some weeks, we simply have too many of those pieces to accommodate everyone, which means delayed gratification for those participating or attending those events. So, our question becomes: do we run fewer photos from all events to get everyone in, or hold over items for feature slots the following week where we can guarantee we can play it up bigger and better in the paper? It's a hard call. As we said at the beginning, all the puzzle pieces are important.
Like any puzzle, sometimes the pieces fit together easily and the puzzle is a snap to put together. Sometimes not so much. Ultimately, the most important pieces of the puzzle are our readers–they help us create the pieces of the puzzle, support our efforts to build the puzzle each week, buy the puzzles when we're done with them and let us know how we did. And the next week, we do it all over again…