From the publisher

Newspapers report what happened. Sure, we also report some of what will or may happen in the days ahead, but most of the Sentinel tells you what occurred last week in the community that may affect or interest you.

By definition, it's old news by the time you get it in your mailbox or buy it at the store on Thursdays.

It's not deliberately old, it's just a matter of timing.

Publishing a weekly newspaper has its time and production constraints, which dictate how old the news is by the time we get it into your hands.

To distribute the Sentinel on Thursday mornings, we have the paper printed on Wednesday in Petersburg - the closest printing press - and flown to Wrangell that afternoon. To print on Wednesday morning, we have to finish all of our reporting and writing by Tuesday. That's where the "old" starts to set in.

Numbers, such as COVID-19 cases, can change between Tuesday and Thursday. Ferries can break down over the two days, planes can divert due to bad weather, meeting dates can change, legislative plans can go in the opposite direction of what was expected, and people can change their minds a lot between Tuesday and Thursday.

We try our best to anticipate what may change, what could be different on Thursday, 48 hours after we finish our reporting. But we can't always get it totally right.

Sure, we can always report what changed the next week, but it's frustrating.

Just as exasperating is when something happens after we have finished putting together the Sentinel and we want to get the news into that week's paper but can't, due to the production deadlines.

Such as last week, when the Alaska Department of Transportation late Tuesday evening announced its draft ferry schedule for the fall and winter. The schedule is a stinker for Wrangell, with just one northbound sailing every other week and one lonely southbound sailing the other weeks for October and November.

It's embarrassing that Thursday's Sentinel did not report the news of the ferry schedule, but the news happened too late for deadline. As much as we understand why, it's still frustrating to wait a week to report the news that means so much to the community.

And while the Sentinel has increased its budget to print 12 pages a week instead of eight, that still leaves limited space for articles. That's particularly noticeable with Tuesday evening borough assembly meetings, when we have to pick what news can fit into the Sentinel on deadline night and which stories will have to wait to the next week.

That makes some of the news old news the next week, but still useful news.

The point in all this? Other than explaining why we miss stories sometimes, or why the Sentinel might say something was expected to happen on a Wednesday when, in fact, it never happened by the time you read about it on Thursday.

The point is that we believe it is important for the community to understand how the Sentinel operates, why some stories appear on time in the weekly paper and why some seem to be a week late. Why sometimes the numbers on Thursday look like they are left over from Tuesday.

It's not wrong, just a little old. But always accurate at the time we wrote the story. And that's what counts. Accuracy and fairness never get old, and we do our best to be both.