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March 24, 2006

The Friday shuffle

While many of you spend Fridays wrapping up your work for the week, newspaper folks spend Fridays putting together the equivalent of three days worth of newspapers.

We're doing the Saturday paper, as you might expect. But we're also finishing off everything we can for Sunday's paper. And doing the same for Monday's paper.

That's because we have minimal staffing on the weekends ... everybody except the Sports department, of course, which is always fully staffed on weekends because that's when we play our games. Otherwise, we run a lean ship on our desk with editors checking the wire services, producing "live" pages and a small local news staff of reporters and an editor covering the weekend and watching for breaking news.

That means we spend Fridays shuffling copy around to make sure we have enough for all the upcoming editions.

Today, for example, we've got an interesting Page One display (that's what we call the big story and photo in the middle of the page) on St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, which has just received really high marks for its coronary artery bypass surgeries.

Sunday, our display is a package of stories on school nurses ... and what happened to them.

And Monday we've got a great yarn on a 1944 mid-air plane collision over Camarillo. You'll have to read why that's back in the news.

That's the plan. Unless we shuffle things around some more.


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