In one paper I visited, copy editors played pinochle for three hours waiting for copy, and then shoveled for the rest of the long night. Pagination has deprived copy editors everywhere of half their reading time, and late copy can take away the other half. Then you get headlines and cutlines swiped from leads, and no safety-net reading. Anybody who sits on a copy desk knows that at about 8 or 9 p.m., the ceiling suddenly opens, and a giant wad of the worst copy hits all at once. Mushy deadlines move the arrival of this difficult copy later in the cycle, when copy editors have run out of time, energy, and interest.
Some staffs disagree on what the deadline means, but they don t know that.
No wonder they came out late. So make sure you have deadlines, that everybody agrees on what they mean, and everybody meets them, including you. Someone asked the poet Robert Frost why he didn t write free verse. Journalism ain t much of a game without deadlines.