put to bed
To prepare (a newspaper) for printing.
put to bed: lock down a newspaper for the press
To put a newspaper to bed means to complete all editorial and design work, lock the final pages, and hand them off to the printing department. The term describes the moment when no further changes can be made to that edition, typically a few hours before press time. Once pages are locked, corrections become prohibitively expensive or impossible, so this is the final checkpoint where editors confirm everything is correct and complete.
The workflow varies by publication size and deadline. At a daily newspaper with a morning edition, pages might go to bed around 10 p.m. for a 6 a.m. print start. At a weekly, the bed time might be several days before distribution. Digital-first outlets still use the phrase, though their "bed" is now a content management system rather than a physical plate. The term stuck because it captures the finality of the moment: once asleep, the paper is out of editorial hands.
What happens after bedtime
Once pages are locked, the prepress department takes over. In traditional offset printing, pages are separated into color separations (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), film is imaged, and printing plates are made. Modern digital workflows skip film but still require locked data. Any discovered error after bed time requires either killing a run (reprinting from scratch), creating an insert, or running a correction in the next edition, each option costly and reputation-damaging.
The phrase extends beyond newspapers to any publication with fixed deadlines: magazines, catalogs, and even direct mail use it. Newsrooms have specific protocols for who can authorize changes after a section goes to bed and how to handle urgent late-breaking news. Some editors hold a "late news" slot reserved for the final page, allowing one section to stay open longer for breaking stories while others are already in production.
Missed deadlines or pages that go to bed with errors have spawned disaster stories in newsroom lore. A misspelled name in a headline or a blank ad space becomes permanent across hundreds of thousands of copies. This high-stakes finality is why the metaphor endured: once a newspaper goes to bed, it cannot wake up and be changed.