Commencement ceremonies are high atop our list of priorities this time of year. Some papers opt for a front page story or centerpiece. Others put the content inside, referring to it from the front.

But what do you do if you have more than one graduation to cover? What about a dozen? Or, say, 54?

Yep, that's the combined number The Patriot Ledger and The Enterprise has covered this year and last.

The two publications tag-teamed the local graduation ceremonies and put its coverage in one or both editions. Here's a slideshow of pages that appeared in Monday's Ledger.

What I really like about these pages? The candid photography. The images almost feel as if I'm looking at pages in a school yearbook. Also nice are the headlines, many of which are inspirational quotes taken from the commencement address. Fantastic!

Chazy Dowaliby, editor of the papers, calls this coverage a committment to the communities.

"Both the Enterprise and The Patriot Ledger made commitments to expand already historically strong coverage of graduations to include every college and high school in our wide circulation areas about four years ago," Dowaliby says. "That was driven in part by the opportunity we had to post photo galleries on our websites."

Planning for such blanket coverage was made easier with the use of a spreadsheet. On it each school's ceremony date was listed, along with when and where and in what publication it would appear. Ceremonies for some two dozen schools appeared in both pubs.

Dowaliby shares how she and her staff at two newspapers pulled it off:

Most graduations were full page coverage in print consisting of a short story, a list of graduates by name and several photos in print. On the web we have galleries of 20 photos or more from each graduation, but we drive readers back to print or e-editions to see the names of the graduates as print exclusives. And we ask readers to submit their photos as well.

The big edition for the Ledger was Monday June 6th, when we ran the June 4 and June 5 graduations (19 in all, because we do not publish a Sunday paper – just a Saturday weekend edition.) The biggest edition for The Enterprise was Sunday June 5 (11 schools).

We coordinated with advertising and with circulation for promotion.

Because our areas also overlap with many GateHouse New England weeklies and Wicked Local websites, we also coordinated unduplicated coverage with our weekly brethren. It meant an amazingly well planned, detailed, timed and disciplined operation. And as far as I could tell, we had only one small hiccup with one story.

Photographers and reporters fed their work into their websites or to Ledger and Enterprise, editors and copy desk folks who worked like the dickens to get everything edited, designed, proofed, printed and posted overnight in most instances.

Congrats not only to the thousands of our local graduates, but to the GHMNE team effort that brought the news to tens of thousands of people across our print, web and mobile platforms this weekend.

Congratulations, indeed.

How is your paper handling local high school graduations? Send pages and comments to the email below.

Joe Greco is corporate design director for GateHouse Media.
Contact him at jgreco@gatehousemedia.com.