The Timely Crier
OR NOT, AS THE CASE MAY BE! But once upon a time the Crier pretty much always
arrived on time, and this is how it was:
Thursday before last Thursday in month: Editors start work on editorial pages. 24 man/woman hours anticipated (as in we hope, and not counting advertising work, which is a different story), so need weekend. Target: Sunday evening.
Monday 8.30 am: Distribution manager Ruth Stinton arrives, takes Crier to Burwell Print Centre, often with editorial/contents/diary to follow when finished.
Tuesday/Wednesday: Editors supply missing pages (sometimes quite a lot of missing pages) to Print Centre, who are fortunately very flexible.
Thursday Lunchtime: Crier printed, Ruth collects and takes to Village Hall.
Thursday 2pm: Hand collating in Village Hall by select group of volunteers organised by Ruth. Crier bundled up for each distributor, who take them themselves if present, come and collect, deliver to other distributors, and so forth.
Thursday pm onwards: Distributors distribute, Crier comes through letter box, frequently the same day.
Result: HAPPINESS. But...
A dwindling team of collating volunteers, and only two villagers (Ron Prime and Peter Partridge) can master Crier stapler, especially with bigger Crier (yes, twice the size and frequency of Burwell Clunch, and that's the way we aim to stay) plus nobody's getting any younger, so when (2 years ago?) Burwell Print Centre offer to collate for us, we jump at the chance.
Editors now bask in new found freedom not to stay up until 2am in the morning, but alas, it is short-lived. Although up-to-date machines could dispense with our magazine in a couple of hours, the Crier is too big for Burwell's automatic collating, so it must be done by hand, which takes a long time. They have to run our adverts in advance to make that 4 day turn-around - the maximum we can cope with - but can't guarantee it and can't be flexible anymore. If anything is even slightly delayed or goes wrong (last month, advance reprint of adverts happened before we could supply corrections) this can lead to long delays, and then even longer since distributors never know when it will appear. Recently, the situation has become even worse because our Vista version of Publisher no longer prints properly on our printer, and there's an extra day to print the top copy in Cambridge.
Result: MISERY. And so...
We have a very good long-standing relationship with Burwell Print Centre, who are very much a Community print centre. We do not want to go elsewhere but we do have to reduce the delay between copy being ready and the magazine being ready for distribution. One answer would be to reintroduce collating in the Village Hall which was also a nice social event.
So Anyone for hand-collating? And could you master that stapler?