The latest turn of the college football-driven conference realignment carousel took me back to the Pleistocene Era of journalism, when I worked as a summer news desk clerk amid the telex machines, pneumatic tubes and desk drawers full of booze at the dearly departed Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
A sign on an editor’s desk caught my eye: “Deadline is a two-syllable word.” Succinct and sly, it mocked one of the newsroom’s most sacrosanct tenets: Don’t blow deadline.
But in the digital era of continuous publishing, the notion of a deadline — which melds two of Merriam-Webster’s more unequivocal words — has somehow become malleable, a transformation that brings me back to the recent maneuverings of San Diego State University.