Monday, September 12, 2005

The Washington Post sold too many advertisements for its newspaper yesterday and cut out two pages of paid death notices, angering many people who had expected to see them. Most of those notices are in today's paper.

A robust week of sales by the advertising department for the paper's classified sections led to two more pages than the production staff had expected, said Hugh J. Price, The Post's director for operations and planning. By Saturday night, the number of pages for yesterday's paper was 98, but the presses could handle only 96, Price said.

Production staff did not realize the problem until late Saturday and scrambled to decide what to cut. The decision was made that death notices could run later in the week, Price said. Cutting advertisements from the news sections would have been more difficult, he added. He also acknowledged that the paper would have lost revenue if it had cut out employment advertising, which reaches more people Sunday than other days.

Many people who had paid for death notices that did not run as scheduled yesterday called the newspaper to complain.

-- David Nakamura