Maybe the best place to start is right near the end – Thursday morning.
The day the paper gets delivered.
The work day of Western News deliveryman extraordinare Bill Little begins about 4 a.m. at the loading dock of the Webco printing plant in Hyde Park, a 10-minute drive west of campus. He’ll be done with his rounds by about 11 a.m unless a flyer insert in the paper drags things out to 4 p.m. or later.
The paper gets printed overnight Wednesday-Thursday. The 10,000 copies take about an hour and a half to prep and print, swallowing up some 13 kilograms of ink.
Western News also gets baked (fill in favourite joke here), a heat treatment that keeps your hands clean.
Bill ‘bombs’ papers into his truck and he’s off to Western, making rounds based on a schedule that takes into account when buildings open and trying to fill high-use boxes early.
A Western retiree, Bill works for city delivery contractors Larry and Shirley Merriam. He’s as much the face of Western News as reporters Paul Mayne and Heather Travis, and advertising/delivery coordinator Denise Jones.
We work all week to assemble the paper, but without Bill and Larry it would just take up space in a warehouse. A master of ‘groaner’ humour, Bill is a cheery, high-energy, full-of-tales character and a proud member of the far-flung Little clan that shaped Western’s early years. He’ll tell you he worked on campus before it was the campus – as an 11-year-old caddying at the old Hunt Club Country Club site that coursed across the current campus.
Bill delivers to about 50 white boxes and other ‘media centres’ in high-traffic buildings. The boxes are expensive – we pay Physical Plant to build them – but keeping papers off the floor is essential for safe and neat traffic areas.
There’s a stop at the main mailroom where labeled bundles and papers get directed to dozens of on-campus addresses, as well as universities across the country. Then Bill heads off-campus. Western News is in all city library branches, the Masonville Chapter’s and Loblaw’s, the hospitals, Fanshawe College, Grand Theatre, London Museum, Covent Garden Market, and so on.
Back in Hyde Park, Webco is bagging and mailing papers for more than 200 subscribers. Some are holdovers from when retirees got a free subscription (that budget line ended years ago). Some have paid subscriptions, some are people we want to encourage to know more about Western – local MPs, MPPs and media.
Delivering the news would be complicated enough if it stopped there. But the days of Western News being a print-only publication ended more than a decade ago.
The online Daily News Service (DNS) on the homepage was born in 1997 to deliver information of an immediate nature. Now, more than 10,000 stories sit in its searchable, publicly accessible database. Some stories have been read a dozen times, others are pushing 40,000 viewings. Visit https://communications.uwo.ca/com/search.
When we post new DNS stories, they appear at the top of the news list and older ones drop down until moving off the page. On heavy days we add five or six new items – and there’s only room for five. Few stories last on this premier real estate more than two days.
These days we also deliver Western News another way, one that coincidentally has really eaten into our mail subscription revenues.
We post a PDF of the paper on the homepage (www.uwo.ca) on Thursday. A couple of thousand readers may pick us up that way. Every issue since 2005 is in the archive. (https://communications.uwo.ca/western_news/PDF_archive.html).
For now, print and online news coexist in our small operation. Print is on shaky ground in some markets as younger readers flee to the web but our print run has been stable at 10,000 for years.
We don’t know why, but we think it’s because our readers still talk to us. Many of you are fiercely possessive of Western News as your paper, the voice of your community. And you get rightly upset if we get it wrong. So do we.
In coming months, I invite you to offer suggestions. Write stories about your area of campus, express an opinion on issues that matter to you. Tell me what should appear in this space.
Hopefully the newspaper Bill delivers will continue to matter enough that you will continue to pick it up.
The writer is editor of Western News
In the coming year we’ll use this space on an occasional basis to answer questions about Western News. We welcome your suggestions for future articles. Contact the writer at newseditor@uwo.ca.