Going back to Wednesdays

For the first time since the Civil War, a newspaper won’t be rolling off a press in Nevada’s capital.

The company that purchased the press in Carson City at the beginning of the year will be shutting it down in the next little while, and all the publications that it printed will be heading over the Sierra.

For us that means Tracy, Calif., and a change in the mid-week publication day back to Wednesdays. For R-C subscribers who were getting their Thursday paper on Wednesday night, it won’t be too much of a transition.

We shifted to the Thursday edition in July 2018, in part because we were sharing a press with the Reno Gazette-Journal and we were trying to spread out the publishing times. We’d been printing on Wednesdays for roughly 25 years before that. 

Moving to a Thursday publication truncated the time we had to prepare for Saturday, so from that perspective going back to Wednesday isn’t a bad thing. But it does mean we’re going to have to have the Wednesday paper pretty much ready to go by Monday night.

I never changed the deadlines when we went to Thursday, but starting next week, the noon Monday deadline for copy and letters will be far less flexible. 

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Before the Nevada Appeal joined the fold back in the mid-1990s, The R-C would print at South Lake Tahoe, which meant we had to always keep an eye on the weather.

Back then, we had to paste up the paper and send it over Kingsbury Grade by 1 p.m. or so. Then we would get it back sometime around 11 p.m. for delivery.

We’ve been sending pages electronically for almost a quarter century. But there’s no getting around the fact that someone in a truck is going to have to bring the papers back over the mountains in order to get them out to our subscribers.

Rather than have that truck go back and forth every day, we’re consolidating the days we print so there’s just one trip.

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In Nevada’s early days, itinerant printers would roam from camp to camp with their presses strapped to the back of an animal or sometimes their own back.

Snowshoe Thompson carried type for the Territorial Enterprise over the Sierra when the famous tome started out in Genoa back in 1859. 

We’re still newspaperin’ in Carson Valley some 163 years later despite a lot of hurdles and changes along the way.

There will be some glitches over the next few months and we ask our customers to bear with us, as they have for many, many decades.

Kurt Hildebrand is editor of The Record-Courier. Reach him at khildebrand@recordcourier.com or 775-782-5122.