It wasn’t that long ago that a weekend call about breaking news filled me with dread. If something big was happening unexpectedly in The Evening Sun’s back yard on a Saturday (or for that matter, a Friday afternoon or Sunday), there was nothing we could do about it except wait until Monday.

Being a Monday through Friday newspaper is at once a blessing and a curse. A blessing, of course, because we can pretend we have a regular nine-to-five job and feign some semblance of a life on the weekends. A curse, because of that aforementioned 72-hour news black hole, in which larger newspapers beat us to the punch with their Saturday or Sunday editions.

My, how times have changed.

While we still only publish a print edition Monday through Friday, it’s only in the last couple years or so that we’ve come to use our website, evesun.com, to break news over the weekend. A good, and statistically best, example of that occurred last weekend. You’ve no doubt read Tyler Murphy’s behind-the-scenes account of how the murder in Sherburne played out in his column Tuesday. On my end, while my first thought used to be of the dreaded “it’ll have to wait until Monday” variety, on Saturday it was “give me whatever you’ve got, and we’ll get it online.”

That was my contribution to developing the murder story as it unfolded Saturday – getting the bits and pieces of it as they came in up on our website throughout the day. Through Tyler and Jill Kraft’s work, I’m proud to say that evesun.com was the first news outlet to release the name of the victim, then the name of the accused murderer, and the only one with a “perp walk” picture from the arraignment – all updated throughout the day as the story came to light.