Students in MEJO 457, Advanced Editing, are writing guest posts for this blog this semester. This is the 11th of those posts. Hannah Smoot is a senior journalism major at UNC-Chapel Hill. She spends most of her waking hours working at The Daily Tar Heel.
On April 3, UNC won the NCAA national championship in men’s basketball. As a senior at UNC, this was a dream come true. As managing editor of The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s independent, student-run newspaper, my feelings were a little more complicated.
More than anything, I was excited — this year, The Daily Tar Heel stopped producing a print newspaper on Tuesdays, but we had a special edition championship edition in the works.
Part of me was apprehensive at the same time. While we’re used to putting together a print paper every day, this would be an especially taxing night.
In preparation, we moved our print deadline to 2:30 a.m. — and missed it by about an hour. We were stuck waiting on writers in Phoenix (the site of the Final Four) to find Wi-Fi and send in their stories. In this situation, we had to figure out how editors can effectively communicate with writers and hold writers to a deadline.
Before we sent writers to Phoenix, we sat down and asked them what a reasonable deadline would be. We talked about how long it would take them to check stats, interview players and finish writing, and then brought that deadline to our printers and worked out a deadline.
Of course, the night of the game, this deadline was much harder to hold our writers to. Holding writers to a deadline can be difficult enough when they’re in the same room as you — but we realized just how hard it could be when they’re not even in the same state.
While we missed our deadline, we were able to get the pages to the printer in time to start handing out papers at 7 a.m. This was in part because we were firm with the writers — and made sure they knew why the deadline needed to be followed as closely as possible. Communication is always important, but in this case, over-communicating our needs with the writers was critical to printing a paper at all.
When we finally got the stories, we sped-read the stories, checking for accuracy in record speed. We went to bed, woke up at 7 a.m. and started handing out papers.
In all, I got about one hour of sleep and worked over 30 hours almost nonstop in two days. While it was one of the most exhausting days I’ve had at the DTH, working for a student newspaper during the NCAA championship was an incredible experience unlike any other Franklin Street rush.
The Editor's Desk 
So proud of you and your staff at the Daily Tar Heel. Hope my son will send me one or bring it to me to peruse in FL. I understand your made a nice profit and made sure the student body each received a paper. Ace reporting.