While the journos are out chasing stories and the sales team are drumming up advertising, it's worth remembering the person who is the lynchpin between us gathering the news and you reading it in the paper and online.
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Pam Baldock is The Courier's circulation administration coordinator. She makes sure the newspaper and its online version gets distributed as smoothly and swiftly as possible - no easy task during lockdowns.
Knowing how many papers are likely to sell, and when they might be sold is a bit of a dark science.
We don't have a crystal ball on where they're going to shop
- Pam Baldock
"My day-to-day job is making sure the newsagents have enough papers," Pam says.
"In this COVID time, it's been difficult because buyers' buying patterns have changed. In the lockdown, all the mums that are staying at home, home-schooling their kids, their shopping habits change, where they shop and when they shop. We don't have a crystal ball on where they're going to shop.
"In the bigger towns, you just have to try and keep a supply that you think may be suitable. And that changes a lot. The regional towns, their supply goes up, because the workers are staying in their home towns; they're not going into Ballarat to work. So we see that supply go up a little bit.
"Then you've got the footy and all the sports that aren't played; the cafes that aren't open. So the supply is very erratic at the moment."
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Pam says she has found trends in sales and readership over the time of the pandemic to enable her to predict what the need for The Courier's product will be, with the announcement of a lockdown coinciding with an uptake in newspapers.
"When we're going into a lockdown, the supermarkets will be busy, so you put more on the supermarkets," she says.
"Then obviously, with the lockdown, there's a reduced amount of papers that we sell, so we cut them a little bit. When we're coming out of lockdown, I've also noticed a trend. Paper sales won't be as huge because people have been inundated with the news. They don't want to read it, they're not supportive of the news as much as they would be regularly. So the first two weeks after lockdown are interesting; there's a gradual increase of supply."
Another part of Pam's work is to liaise with print sites in Victoria and South Australia for the weight of printed publications on delivery trucks, ensuring they go out with the correct weight distribution every day. And, Pam says, talking to customers about their subscriptions and helping them sort problems is a highlight of her day.
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