I agree, I think that’s the true origin. It all starts at the lowest level of the account team with each consecutive level adding a day for their CYA cushion. Then … once it hits the creative side it all starts working backward; each level of creative takes off a day until the photographer is hired with less that 2 days to complete the assignment. The true owner of the calendar is often so enigmatic that no one really knows until it’s discovered that the insertion date was missed by a week, in which case last months ad will do just fine.

You would think that, after a while, when you were told “Wednesday is the drop dead deadline”, you’d immediately (internally) reset that deadline for Friday, at least inside your head.

In my other life as a senior art director in advertising it was something us creatives dealt with all the time. And still do. According to ancient sea scrolls found in the recesses of Ogilvy & Mather or maybe it was Grey – the fake deadline was invented and perfected as an art form by junior account executives looking to impress their superiors in order gain promotion and advancement by getting work from creatives to clients well ahead of the actual deadline. In fact so impressive was this technique that it quickly spread up the ladder so that senior level people began to promise work (and new business pitches) to clients well ahead of schedule. And thus the standard two week turnaround for an ad assignment in 1984 is now a twelve hour turn around in 2008. If that. Okay, computers and such have led clients into believing ideas can be delivered faster than ever before as well. But the point remains that the fake deadline has been around for a while and like the cockroach, will survive Armageddon. Sigh.

Just one of the reasons I left full time advertising.

It’s not much different in any business. Everyone’s always late on ad deadlines, payment deadlines, etc. I had a friend who would be flown around the globe for a huge automotive supplier with a team on chartered jets, picking up parts from factories around the world in a rush to get them to headquarters by “next week.” Inevitably all the parts would sit in the hallway for months until he was told to get rid of them.

This has helped in getting a more true deadline.

Its can be very difficult to supply hardproofs when you are working on something against deadline and you’re in another country. What looks good in RGB on a photographer’s monitor may not translate well to CMYK on a high speed web and without a hardproof I will be lost on how to translate the digital file, and be forced to go with my [actually my QC person and designer's] vision of the digital file.

AS drop dead dates: rarely are dates so droop dead that something can’t be done to get some extension from the printing plant. Printing plants will do everything in their power to make a job successful – meaning print at the contracted quality and on time.

I’ve had my pages taken away from the press and another job printed to give me extra time without extra cost to prepare pages in an emergency. This means that the dropdead date I gave changed but not that I lied.

Absolutely. Just starts to pall in the end doesn’t it.

Especially when you know that once your end is over – after you’ve busted your ass getting files out of the door, stayed up ’til 2am two nights running, forgotten to walk the dog, eat and ignored your wife – you’re history.

You’re so history that when you call after 90 days to see where your payment is, Tracey in accounts says “Uh, we only do payment runs on the 3rd Thursday after Lent”.

Photographer’s deadlines don’t count when it comes to money..

After you get about a dozen of those scenarios, you begin to remember that childhood book about “The Boy That Cried Wolf”, and your attitude begins to sour a bit, knowing that you’re being lied to.

After about a dozen more of those emails, you start the search for a post-production house to hand this stuff off to, to remove yourself from their problems. It’s like being on the clock 24/7, always waiting for that next panicked email.

1. Sooner or later everyone will realize the deadlines are phony and then ignore your deadlines.

2. We are professionals and we are not turning out High School yearbooks. We are paid to make magazines. To use a quote by Joe Lewis I use often:

“To be World Champion means that you show up at 9 P.M. on Wednesday and fight.”

Truthfully, I know many people at all levels in magazine that do not meet this criteria; and of cause the higher the level in management the greater the chaos they can cause.

Perpetual closing doesn’t work for a monthly, though for a weekly it would work. Also its hard to close edit if advertising is still selling ads; and you are crazy to try and shut down ad sales.

I do believe a publication needs different deadlines for different parts of the publication; you need a flow. BIG lumps costs money and cause mistakes. Production, copy and research should not have down days. Everyone in the magazine should be working on multiple issues.

All editorial dates are set off of press due dates, which are set a year before – another discussion on how accurate those dates are. You need to decide how many proofs from the engraver you need [an average] and then back off from the press due date. This will give you your close dates; the days you will actually ship pages to the engraver. The press due dates should not dictate the internal due dates. You need to sit down and decide which part of the magazine should have early deadlines and which late deadlines. The deadline for the early text should be early enough that production, copy and research are still working and the previous issue. Again, NO DOWN TIME.

I do not ship pages to engraver until ‘Ship week.’ We get them to a final state and they sit in my room.
There are more details but I don’t think its that interesting to none production people.

We rarely work until 10 P.M. most late night now are 8 P.M.

As for finding time for emergencies, if you flow a magazine properly you will have the time.

BTW I am a production flunky.

The lesson I learned from this was to always plan the month so that people are waiting on someone else.

;-)