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Telegraph beats Bank Holiday deadline with special one-page edition

The Northants Evening Telegraph beat Bank Holiday deadlines with a special one-page edition when a major blaze broke out in its circulation area.

The evening paper had already gone to press on Sunday evening when a fire broke out at Rushden Town Band Club in the early hours of Bank Holiday Monday so – faced with the dilemma of how to get the story to its readers – staff decided to pull out all the stops.

Assistant editor Nick Tite had been woken by a callout telling him about the fire at the oldest working men’s club in the town, and he and chief photographer Glyn Dobbs quickly secured the story.

But the press night crew had already gone home, and so they had to find an alternative way of getting it published.

First its website was updated with the story and photograph, and calls were then made to find out which newsagents would be open for business on the Bank Holiday.

It was then decided to print a one-page edition of the Evening Telegraph through the proofer, and then 400 copies of the front page were made on a photocopier.

Pages were then sent to all the newsagents to give away with every newspaper they sold.

Editor Jeremy Clifford said: “That way we were still able to get a news bill out onto the streets telling readers that we had the story.

“It was unconventional and I suppose there was the risk of us looking unprofessional. But our main aim was to get the story out onto the streets and with a newspaper that we had already produced.

“The newsagents we managed to get the page to were very appreciative and said that every copy of the page had been sold by early in the afternoon.

“It is an unfortunate sign of the times that in the drive to hit ever earlier deadlines and the fact that newsagents are increasingly only opening for very short periods of time on Bank Holidays that we were unable to get the story in the main newspaper. So we showed a bit of ingenuity.

“And of course we were able to promote from the page that we would be carrying full reports and pictures in the next day’s newspaper.”