THE REYKJAVIK SUMMIT : Deadlines Stretched, Costs Soar : Summit Delays News Weeklies

The unscheduled fourth session of the Iceland summit broke the usual Sunday deadlines for Time and Newsweek, and will add costs “in six figures” to their production budgets, executives of both magazines said.

Ron Kriss, executive editor of Time, said the presses in “more than a dozen” plants, which produce about 5.3 million copies of the magazine each week, normally would have started their runs early Sunday afternoon. Instead, he said, Time’s copy deadline was pushed back until after the fourth session ended at 2:50 p.m. EDT, and the presses were silent until early evening.

“They threw us a curve with that unscheduled meeting,” Kriss said. The cost of rushing print and circulation schedules to catch up will be “somewhere in six figures,” he said.

Richard M. Smith, Newsweek’s editor-in-chief, said his magazine was incurring “substantial costs at substantial gains for the readers.” He said it would be “well into the evening” before the presses, which usually start running on Saturday nights, would begin to turn out Newsweek’s 3.5-million-copy run from four domestic plants and three abroad.

One news magazine had no problem with the agenda in Iceland. U.S. News & World Report, following its usual schedule, turned out the first copies of its Oct. 20 edition late Saturday.