If you read the print edition of the paper, you may have noticed that at the bottom of the front page, we always give a preview of what’s coming in the next day’s paper.
On Fridays, this means that we promote a story coming on Saturday. This also means that we have to decide on  Thursday evening what will go in that spot, meaning that we have to look ahead two days to the weekend.
In a perfect world, newspapers would know exactly what their feature story plans were weeks ahead, but that is not reality at most papers. Stories fall through. Events change. Things happen that make it so we have to be very careful what we say we’re going to do in the future so as not to make liars of ourselves. (These sorts of lineup changes are especially prone to happen on the weekends, it seems.)
So, at yesterday’s editorial meeting, we found ourselves unable to make a promise any story for Saturday’s paper. I suggested promoting our Facebook page in print as a last resort.
I have suggested this in the past, but my suggestion has never been accepted, mainly because it’s preferable to tease something that’s actually going to be on paper than something that sends people to their computers to read.
Yet it’s nice to see the Chronicle’s online and print worlds merging a bit. Online depends on print, and, increasingly, print depends on online. I hope that in the future we can find more places to promote our online content in print.
Do you have ideas about how we can tie the website and the paper closer together? Share them in the comments.