Every production night is just that, a production.

It takes a whole team to put the newspaper together twice a week. From the reporters to the editors; from the senior editors to the editor in chief; from the photographers to the production staff: we are a team.

Production nights can go smoothly when all those parts of the team are working together. Every production night we have numerous factors to consider. For example, in this Monday’s issue we had two major questions that I was involved in making decisions on. I’ll briefly run through those questions and how we answered them.

The first involved deciding what stories to put on the front page. On every production day David Ceasar and I, the two senior news editors, along with Caitlin Carroll meet to discuss what stories will appear on the front page. Two stories had already been decided to go on page one: the 9-11 Tribute and the Basketball tickets story. So we had space to put two news stories on the front page.

The three of us easily agreed to put the J St. story about the liquor license not being obtained by the University into at least December on the front page. We had room for one more story and were deciding between the mayoral debate coverage story and the update on the health and safety inspections.

Eventually we decided to run with the health and safety inspection story on the front page because the debate article was basically coverage of an event that had happened three days before, a little bit late for a story to go on the front page. We had a debate about how important the inspection story was. While it is an important story that a lot of students cared about last year, the news in this article was not huge ground-breaking news. But it’s still an important story, so we went with it on the front page. We put the Mayoral Debate as the lead story on page three, usually the place reserved of our most important story that is not on front page.

So we had the front page all set. A little bit of a discussion, but it turned out fine.

The second question we discussed was the layout of the front page. The production team and I knew that the J St. story would be the lead story and we also knew that we wanted to play the basketball tickets article prominently. We decided that a photo of the September 11 memorial should also go above the fold.

Based on these considerations we planned on having the photo in the middle and a story on either side. It looked fine, but one issue- it was an extremely similar layout to that of our paper that came out on September 7. So the production staff and I had a discussion. Did it matter? Would people notice? Should we change it? Couuld we change it?

We ended up sticking with the original design mainly because it was the best way to layout the page without posting two stories directly next to each other, which we have done in the past. So the second issue was resolved. Not a big deal, but still an interesting debate.

I left the office by about 1 a.m. on Monday morning and the e-mail edition went out around 4:30 a.m. We’ve done it quicker but we’ve also done it a lot slower. Just some perspective on what a production night is like at The Hatchet. Now imagine doing that twice a week for the entire semester…