If you were amazed to see people lining up all over the country to buy newspapers on Nov. 5, wait until 500 street hawkers fan out across Washington, D.C., to sell afternoon editions of
The Washington Post on Inauguration Day -- and do it again the next day.
The
Post plans to publish a total of 1.72 million copies of morning and afternoon editions on Jan. 20 and 21, all for street sales, according to Mike Towle, director of retail and corporate sales. That's in addition to 490,000 home deliveries on both days, totaling 2.7 million over two days before returns.
The circulation on those days will approach that of the Nov. 5 paper, which sold 1,583,091 copies, the largest circulation "in the history of the
Post, even going back to the '80s when newspapers were king," Towle said.
The
Post will be one of many papers around the country publishing an afternoon edition on Jan. 20, according to editors and circulation managers. That includes places with a connection to President-elect Barack Obama, such as the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin (which already publishes an afternoon edition) and others without, such as the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The
Post-Dispatch plans to print 150,000 to 160,000 copies of an eight-page edition on Tuesday afternoon, said Bernard Hollingsworth, the paper's director of circulation. (It's also increasing its Wednesday morning single-copy run from 35,000 to 36,000 to 100,000.)
[
UPDATE: The
Chicago Tribune will publish a Tuesday afternoon edition, which should hit the streets by 4 p.m., said Joyce Winnecke, associate editor. That's in addition to special sections in Sunday and Wednesday's newspapers.]
The New York Times is not printing a Tuesday afternoon edition, but it is increasing its Wednesday press run from 1.25 million to 2.2 million, according to Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for the
Times. The paper is also planning special coverage in its Jan. 18 Sunday magazine, which will feature portraits of the new administration, with an accompanying online slide show narrated by by photographer
Nadav Kander. Other papers are printing special sections on Sunday, Wednesday or, as with
The Baltimore Sun, on both days.
What
Post buyers will not see on Tuesday is the challenge of getting all those newspapers into their hands. Neither of the paper's printing facilities are in the District itself -- one is a few miles north in College Park, Md., and another is outside the Beltway in Springfield, Va.
All bridges over the Potomac River will be closed, and the roads that will be open
will be jammed with thousands of tour buses -- between 10,000 and 15,000, Towle said.
All those passengers are potential customers, Towle said, and the
Post will try to make them newspaper readers for the day that they're in Washington. Hawkers will target bus parking areas, one of which will be in front of the
Post headquarters.
The
Post will print 275,000 single copies on Tuesday morning, three times as many as usual. (Subscribers number about 490,000, Towle said.) But with security concerns, those papers must be in the District by 2 a.m. Tuesday, compared to somewhere between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. on a normal day.
The
Post's "inaugural special" will go to press at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, about an hour and a half after Obama places his hand on the Bible, and trucks carrying 500,000 of those papers will try to make their way into the city again. Because Towle has no way to predict what routes will be clogged, trucks will take different routes into the city.
To sell those papers, the
Post is employing everyone from the homeless to a group of students from the Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama children now attend. The pay is different for different groups, but a typical hawker will make 40 cents for each sale, Towle said. "We're going to have people out in 20-degree weather for 18 hours," he said, so the
Post will station three RVs around the city to allow the hawkers to rest, refuel and warm up.
Hawkers will try to sell to the "millions of people who will be leaving the city and will not be around ... to get a copy the following day," Towle said.
Towle noted that the challenges for delivering papers on Inauguration Day are a throwback to the blue-collar roots of a circulation department. Unlike modern-day issues for circulation managers, "this is reverting back to logistics -- how to move the equivalent of 40 tractor-trailers of papers in a 36-hour period," he said.
Another complication: Due to security measures, the
Post must remove about 1,000 newspaper boxes from the streets late this Thursday night and won't return them for a week.
On Wednesday morning, the
Post will print 345,000 copies of its morning paper, which Towle expects will be the most attractive edition for collectors. And that afternoon, 600,000 copies of a 36- to 48-page commemorative special edition will hit the streets.
All single copies on Tuesday and Wednesday will cost $2, compared to the daily single copy price of 75 cents, Towle said.
Will all of those papers sell? "I have no doubt that all the papers on Wednesday will move," he said. And a "good amount" will sell on Tuesday, he said, as long as the trucks can get to central Washington. "The thing about Tuesday is gridlock."
Will all of those papers sell? "I have no doubt...
