From the editor: Christmas, it’s the most frantic time of the year
Christmas is a busy time! Picture Archant. - Credit: Archant
Whatever you are doing, wherever you are going, I hope you have a fantastic Christmas and New Year.
I thought I would use this week's column to give you a glimpse of how the festive period works in our newsroom.
Christmas Day falls on a Monday this year so that gives us one fewer Evening News to pull together, and one fewer EDP, which our editorial teams also produces.
Ten years ago that would have meant an extra day of holiday for the team, but in this digital era news and sport never sleeps.
Even on Christmas Day there's a surprisingly large audience who want to know what's been going on out there. And where's there's demand, we always aim to meet it.
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With that in mind Christmas and New Year can become an administrative nightmare as we aim to strike the balance between having journalists on shift and giving people a proper break to be with their loved ones.
This means that for pretty much 18 hours of every day over the festive period (I'll admit midnight to 6am are something of an Achilles Heel) we will have people on hand to tell you what's going on.
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Of course, alongside the need to keep our websites fresh, we also have the small manner of daily newspapers to provide.
At normal times this is a complex process and we often have two Evening News' being worked on at the same time and two EDPs. The reason for that is we simply can't come in day after day and start from scratch, no media operation in the land could do that so we'll get the content that isn't time sensitive produced as early as possible.
At Christmas, with the team stretched, we have three of both dailies, and sometimes four, being worked on, with large gaps left of course for the news that hasn't yet broken.
Hopefully it will be worth the effort however and you'll all enjoy putting your feet up and taking a bit of time to catch up with what's been going on.
I certainly know that's something I and my team will be looking forward to doing!
Merry Christmas to you all.
