Time Magazine's New Deadlines

By now you've probably heard that Time Magazine is shifting it Monday publication date to Fridays, meaning that its deadline will now be midweek instead of Saturday night. According to the WSJ:

By hitting newsstands before the weekend, rather than at the start of the workweek, Time's publisher Time Inc. hopes to make the magazine more appealing to busy readers... "You want to be in the hands of people when they're ready and eager to read Time magazine, which is Friday, Saturday and Sunday," said Richard Stengel, the recently appointed managing editor of Time. "Monday morning, people's lives take off in a rush, and if they ever kick back, it's on Friday evening."

As a reader, I don't know that it will make any difference to me when Time hits the newsstands. I'll probably do the same thing I do now - read its news-breaking pieces on the web as soon as I hear about them, and then buy the magazine when I'm about to board an airplane and need something to read.

(As an aside, I imagine that Time's new sked will brighten the lives of many of its writers. Time and Newsweek scribes now face a scramble every Friday and Saturday to finish their pieces, particularly when news breaks, then they typically have Sundays and Mondays off. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have the same Saturday-Sunday weekend as everyone else. Anyway...)

While most DC PR people I know don't deal with Time Magazine on a a regular basis, there are a number of DC pubs that also have interesting publication schedules. For example...

• National Journal hits office every Friday morning, which means they have to close out the issue by Wednesday. The hardest part of this, I imagine, is that they write a weekly feature on what's happened on the Hill that week. Kind of difficult to do when the week isn't even half over yet.

• Roll Call's Monday edition wraps on Friday, and then is actually delivered to Hill offices on Saturdays. Which means RC has to be extra careful to craft stories for its Monday edition that won't be stale by then. Of course, clever Hill press secretaries (and especially those with too much time on their hands) know to drop by their offices on Saturdays to pick up Roll Call and get a jump on any big stories in the Monday edition.