Editor’s Notebook: Why Thursday?

This week marks a seismic shift in the Triad City Beat flow. As a workaround to the Fourth of July this week, we opted to hit the streets on Thursday instead of Wednesday. And we liked the idea so much we decided to stick with Thursdays from now on.

We have our reasons.

As a Wednesday paper, we have been becoming increasingly frustrated at the accelerated pace of the news cycle: News often breaks after we put the paper to bed on Tuesday afternoon, and more stuff drops on Wednesdays that might be stale by the time the next paper comes out. It will change the way we handle elections — for more than a decade our editors have scrambled to put the results in a fresh paper on Wednesday; now we will have a full day to digest each race.[pullquote]The Thursday switch is simple to implement, and it creates the illusion among staff of a rare luxury in the news business: Time.[/pullquote]

From a financial standpoint, Thursday is much more significant than Wednesday: It’s the day most people decide how they will spend their time and money over the weekend. That’s why, back in the days of network television, all the best shows aired on Thursday nights.

The move enables us to take a Monday off once in a while — or, in the case of this week, Tuesday. And because our core deadlines remain the same (hear that, freelancers?), it enables us to spread the week’s content out over the course of a few days, instead if the usual Wednesday news dump. Triad-city-beat.com will be getting a lot more love as a result.

Speaking of the site, we’ve tuned up the server and cleaned up the code, finally solving a flash-of-unstyled-content problem that’s been nagging us, literally, for years. I’d explain, but it’s the sort of thing that if you don’t already know what it is, you probably don’t care. Suffice to say that load times are much faster. And it looks great on a phone.

The Thursday switch is simple to implement, and though it doesn’t change the amount of days in a week, it creates the illusion among staff of a rare luxury in the news business: Time. And we could always use more of that.