In a small town, the morning newspaper can be put to bed in the wee hours. That is to say, the actual printing of the pages can be done in the morning, and the deadline for news items can be pushed back enough to include most overnight activities.
It isn’t the same with a big paper. With vending boxes scattered across the state, and in some cases, across state lines, the newspaper has to be completed late in the evening to be distributed before morning. When news breaks late, it won’t make the paper.
The TU-OSU football game on Saturday is a case in point. Originally scheduled to kick off at 9:00pm, the threat of severe weather delayed the game’s start until after midnight, and the final minutes ticked off the clock close to 3:30am.
As a result, the Tulsa World Monday edition features a front page story about game scheduled for Saturday, since its conclusion was far too late to make the Sunday edition. Fans who missed the game had to wait until Sunday afternoon television newscasts to learn the outcome, unless they turned to the internet.
By the time the game was concluded, most of the fans who had weathered the evacuation of Chapman Stadium had gone home as well, calculating the estimated ending hour and given the halftime score. The final was 59-33, with the Golden Hurricane scoring more points that might have been expected against the eighth ranked team in the nation.
The game was already considered to be a late-hour start, moved for the sake of the FOX Sports network and its promise of a larger viewing audience. Whether football fans remained interested in the TV game after a three-hour weather delay is questionable, and whether the audience at 2:00am was larger than it would have been is doubtful.
The inclement weather was not the fault of FOX Sports, but it remains a fact that the game – had it kicked off at its regularly scheduled time before being shuffled to 9:00pm – could have been played in its entirety before the first stroke of lightning.
And we could have read all about it in the morning.
