Notes on a vicennial deadline

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

This week marks 20 years since the first edition of the Sandpoint Reader hit the streets on Dec. 23, 2004. That feels like a trick of the calendar — no way has it been two decades since I clearly remember staying up until 4 a.m. with Chris DeCleur so we could finish laying out the paper, then burning it onto a CD, sleeping for an hour or two, then driving to the printer in Spokane where we hand-delivered it to the pressman who was just finishing the night shift.

I can’t believe we used to do it that way. It’s inconceivable that we didn’t have the technological ability to upload the digital file to a cloud site, where it could then be (almost) instantaneously downloaded by the printer and run out overnight for a morning delivery, which is how we do it now. 

Of course, back then, we were all working on desktop computers that weighed 20 or more pounds, and if we wanted to transfer any digital files whatsoever to each other, they’d have to be emailed. A little later, if they were big files, we transferred them from computer to computer with USB thumb drives. We even had a fax machine.

Zach Hagadone in the original Sandpoint Reader office in March 2012, a few months before the paper went out of publication until it was brought back in January 2015. Photo by Matt M. McKnight.

That’s part of the reason why it took so many more hours for us to get out a paper back then — we didn’t have FTP sites or Google Drive or hundreds of gigs of storage in our email inboxes. The other reason is that we were jackasses, and routinely decided it was a good idea to kick off on deadline at about 9 p.m. to load up on whiskey and beer at the Downtown Crossing and/or the 219, then stumble back to the office and finish our writing and designing. These days, if we’re not out of the office on Wednesday before 8 p.m., we get cranky.

Those are some of the many indications of how long the Reader has been in my — and many others’ — lives. Back when we were working on Vol. 1 No. 1, I’d been 24 years old for less than three months. Then-Staff Writer, now-Publisher Ben Olson was in his final week of being 23. 

My original partners in Reader 1.0 — John Reuter and Chris DeCleur — were barely of legal drinking age. And, not that she was aware of Reader Vol. 1 No. 1, our current Staff Writer Soncirey Mitchell had turned 4 that past spring.

There’s so much water under the Reader dam that considering it too deeply risks triggering my thalassophobia. 

I’ve been on a weekly deadline for the vast majority of those years — if not for the Reader, then some other paper somewhere. That’s a weird way to live, which I and others have written about before in this space, but it feels especially weird on this 20th anniversary week — and amid the general stock-taking that occurs around the end of every year.

When your whole life revolves around the culmination of efforts on a specific day each week, you start counting time in seven-day increments; and, I can tell you, that’s a recipe for making time fly. As Ben and I frequently say by way of a post-deadline toast at the Niner following the completion of each paper, “Another one down.”

This week is especially weird, deadline-wise, not just for its vicennial nature but that we’re experiencing what’s probably our tightest turnaround for making a paper in all those 20 years. Even as the Dec. 19 edition was still fresh on the racks, we were jamming out the words necessary to fill 24 pages due to the printer on Dec. 23. 

The fact that we’re doing it — and have done it, hopefully — is another illustration of how much we’ve grown up over that time. And that’s probably the biggest realization I’m having on this particular deadline: How much of a privilege it’s been to be allowed to grow up in these pages (with notable temporal and behavioral exceptions) in the presence of the people who’ve really made the Reader possible, and that’s the readers.

So cheers to another one down; and, if the next 20 years go by as fast as the previous ones have, 64-year-old me will be back with another, similar rumination before he knows it.