We used to get our weekly paper by mail. Usually it came the day after it was put in the racks in town. Pretty good service I thought.
The ç*¥sed to be daily paper we had was good about getting their Sunday paper in the news rack in front of their office by 8pm on Saturday night. Their delivery drivers hit the streets with papers about the same time. Our Sunday paper usually hit the driveway between 11pm and 1am Saturday night/Sunday morning.
If you had an ad coming out or were really interested if a certain story was going to show up a lot of people would make a trip to get a copy from the news rack.
My wifeç—´ nephew was the editor so I could always just ask, but it was better to actually see it for myself sometimes.
Our newspaper news and sports deadlines were 11:00pm and we didn't start printing until 11:30pm, even later if there were high schools sports, or Notre Dame was playing. They'd start getting papers to packaging by 11:40. Ads were inserted into the paper, then skidded off and trucked out to distribution warehouses. The carriers would pick them up around 4am, and we had a guarantee that your paper would be at your door or in your tube by 7:00am weekdays and Saturday, 8:00am Sunday. Now that they outsourced printing, they cut the deadline way back, so evening sports scores don't make it in anymore. They kept the same delivery schedule.
If you want to stop/start or vacation hold your paper, as long as you got the call in by 5:00pm, the change would take place that night, on the fly.
It was a family owned newspaper until this year. They just sold all of their 8-10 newspapers to a conglomerate a few months ago. Still same people working there, though. Good folks. Keeps the local governments on their toes, no matter the party. Exposed a lot of stuff over the years that people generally didn't know what was going on.
It's rated right down the middle as far as conservative/liberal goes. Funny how if you print a story about cake, 35% of the people will complain loudly that it's too bland, 35% will complain loudly that its too sweet, and the other 30% will just roll their eyes and shake their heads wondering what the $%&^!! is wrong with people arguing about cake.