Deadlines are always a challenge in both the construction and publishing businesses. You certainly don’t want to miss your submission deadline for a bid or RFP response – and if your project has a delivery time, the penalties for being late can be challenging.
I thought about these challenges as we were preparing this issue of North Carolina Construction News for publication.
Our lead story relates to the massive amounts of recovery work still to do from Hurricane Florence – and we were assembling the publication just as Hurricane Dorian began lashing the Outer Banks and eastern parts of the state.
The question: Should we rebuild the issue to cover Dorian, or leave things alone and focus on the Florence recovery efforts.
I decided the “leave things” option would make the most sense, especially since our story about Florence describes the tangible rebuilding opportunities for contractors and subtrades – while the news about Dorian is still developing.
We can certainly provide immediate coverage at the ncconstructionnews.com website, but it sees more logical for us to focus on the longer-range rather than the short-term picture in this magazine.
And that is why we include Jacob D’Albora’s story about the construction industry’s “tipping point” towards modular construction – tied in with climate change and labour shortages – which relate of course to hurricanes and this issue’s other major story describing the challenges contractors are having in filling both skilled and salaried jobs in the state.
Next issue, we’ll undoubtedly have coverage about the Dorian recovery effort and cost.
I always appreciate your feedback and responses as well as story suggestions. You can email me at buckshon@ncconstructionnews.com.