Dismissed Out of Hand
I submitted my Dominican Republic travel feature to the LA Times last night my time, which would have arrived there some time the night before Thursday morning. Their very snarky submissions guidelines said it could take as long as 12 weeks for them to get around to evaluating a story so I settled in to not expect a response for awhile.
So I was a bit surprised the next morning to have a response from them. Looking at the message header, it appears they wrote their response at 7:01:46 am their time, Thursday morning. It reads in its entirety: "Thank you for your submission, Kris. I'm sorry I can't use it."
Given the timing of email, I suspect they started their workday at 7:00 and had rejected my submission without bothering to even look at it within the first two minutes of their day. I rather suspect they don't consider it even worth reading a submission unless it comes from a known established writer. Ah well the thing is already written I guess I'll see if I have better luck flogging it off on a different newspaper.