Coping With A Winter Storm p.

By: Tony Case

Newspapers struggle to get delivered as blizzard blankets the entire Eastern Seaboard
JO-ANN ARMAO, deputy assistant managing editor for metro at the Washington Post, is from Buffalo, so she knows a little something about coping with a winter storm.
But when a ferocious blizzard hit the District of Columbia and the entire Eastern Seaboard March 13, she had much more to contend with than shoveling sidewalks and putting chains on tires.
Armao's boss, assistant managing editor Milton Coleman, charged her with coordinating local coverage of the storm, which dumped a foot of snow on the nation's capital. From her home in Maryland, Armao managed the efforts of four other editors and 25 reporters who prepared stories about hazardous driving conditions, snowman building and elderly people without heat.
"She was the snow maven," Coleman quipped.
"It's the true essence of journalism when you have people really collaborating," Armao related. "Usually, there are reporters who might say, 'Oh, why do I have to do that?' or 'I don't want to do that,' but ideas for stories were so abundant and apparent that people just went out and did them."
For several days, weather forecasters had predicted that the mother of all winter storms was taking shape over the Gulf of Mexico; indeed, after the fact, it was billed by many media as the storm of the century.
However, a problem for news organizations, as Armao noted, is how serious to take such warnings. After all, forecasters had been dead wrong several times this season when they predicted snowfall. "You don't want to go into deadline [telling readers] that there's going to be lots of snow and then be wrong," she said.
So, instead of playing seer, the Post concentrated on what had happened leading up to the storm, reporting on packed supermarkets and video rental outlets and the city's cautious preparation of salt trucks and snowplows.
After the blizzard blasted into town, Armao faced the enormous task of getting reporters cracking to cover the widespread damage it had caused. "I had the luxury of being inside and waking up the reporters to have them go out, but they were great," she remarked.
The Post was "semiprepared" the morning of March 13, Armao said, as a few reporters and copy desk people had stayed overnight at a nearby hotel?just in case?and were able to maneuver quickly to man the newsroom.
Many staffers who live in surrounding communities such as Bethesda, Md., and Falls Church, Va., were stranded and could not get into the office. Some, however, reported from their homes, describing how the storm had affected their neighborhoods, and still other Post employees offered to transport their colleagues via four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Because of the weather, the deadline was moved up one hour, which made getting the paper out even more of a problem, according to Armao. "It was tough," she said, "but it was
exciting."
Despite the wicked storm, a press- room fire and the loss of a major electrical transformer damaged by water, the Philadelphia Inquirer managed to distribute 80% of its Sunday editions.
"The past several days have been difficult," said publisher and chairman Robert J. Hall. With all the problems, "it required a tremendous effort to get our newspapers delivered."
Distribution was especially arduous because the area's interstate highways were closed for most of the weekend.
"We had two main distribution problems," related senior vice president for circulation Jeff Kohler. "Our carriers couldn't get out of their own driveways to get to work and the roads were impassable, with police turning back trucks attempting to make delivery from roads that were closed."
However, the Inquirer was delivered throughout the weekend as roads were cleared by snowplows, according to Kohler.
Customers, he said, "have shown amazing patience, and we are striving to serve them all the very best we can."
Steve Rossi, executive vice president and general manager, said advertisers' needs would also be met. "We will try to offer advertisers opportunities to get additional exposure on one of two days this week or next week."

Snow supplants sun

Unlike Armao, whose hometown of Buffalo is used to such wintertime deluges, Southerners are not accustomed to waking up to a foot of snow, downed power lines and ice-covered streets.
The Birmingham News in Alabama and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution were among the papers that struggled to get the news out in a region known more for its sunshine than its snowdrifts.
"In Birmingham, we might get one little snow a year with a couple of inches, but this time we got 13 inches," said Tom Adams, director of promotion and marketing with the News. "We can't cope with that. It shut down everything."
The newspaper was printed on Saturday and Sunday, but those editions were not delivered until Monday?although customers who braved the elements were able to pick up a copy from the paper's office.
The News received few calls from people wondering where their paper was, according to Adams, and half of those it did receive were "tongue-in-cheek."
"I think most people knew what had happened to their paper when they looked out the window," he remarked.
The newspaper was arranging "make-goods" with its Sunday advertisers, Adams said. "We're going to do whatever the advertiser wants because, heck, it wouldn't have done people any good to see the sale ads [Sunday] anyway because all the stores were closed."
At least one ad in the News came about because of the blizzard. The Alabama Power Co. took out a full-page spread, urging customers to remain patient while it attempted to restore electricity to those homes that had their power knocked out. (Three days after the storm, millions of residents from Louisiana to Maine were reportedly still without electricity.)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Ron Martin related that his newspaper "came out of [the storm] pretty well from a news standpoint, and we are generally satisfied with the coverage we were able to put together."
Many staffers had trouble getting to work ? with the five inches of snow that fell on the city?but "one way or another" they were able to do their jobs, he said. "A lot of our people really knocked themselves out to get into the paper."
One reporter took a helicopter ride with Georgia Gov. Zell Miller to survey the mountains in the northern part of the state, an area hit especially hard by the storm, Martin related. "We got a good look at what was happening from up there."
The news staff also provided excellent photo coverage, he added, noting a dramatic Sunday front-page picture of a tractor-trailer that had jackknifed on a highway.
The Journal-Constitution devoted its reader-service column "Q&A" to the storm, including such information as how to apply for insurance claims, advice on tending to plants and what to do about unused airline tickets. (Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, one of the nation's busiest, was shut down March 13, as were airports in other metropolitan areas such as Baltimore, New York and Washington. Delta Airlines, which is based in Atlanta, bought a full-page ad in the New York Times March 18, thanking customers for their "patience throughout this extraordinary weekend.")
"We can sympathize with the phone company and the power company," Martin commented. On the morning of March 15, he guessed that the papers probably had still another day of "pretty tough going before we get it turned around. It's been quite an adventure."

A delivery nightmare

If it was an adventure for some, it was more like a nightmare for others?especially those who had to deliver newspapers amid these rough conditions.
The Journal-Constitution had reached most subscribers with the March 13 edition before the snow began to pile up, according to Richard Huguley, vice president for circulation. The problem was that when many readers went to fetch their papers, they couldn't find them for all the white stuff.
Delivery on Sunday was a different story. Whereas 95% of the home-delivered copies were distributed March 13, only 75% to 80% of the Sunday editions made it to homes that day.
In a single seven-hour period Sunday, the circulation department was bombarded with 17,552 telephone calls from customers, 99.6% of which were answered, according to Huguley. It was the most calls the paper had ever handled, he said, beating the previous record of 13,000 calls.
"We have pockets where we have not delivered Saturday, Sunday or Monday yet," Huguley related on March 15. Some of the hard-to-reach areas were rural, he said, but there were neighborhoods right in Fulton County that were hard to get to because of the hills.
Most subscribers who did not get their Sunday paper received it either with their Monday edition or soon thereafter, he said. "I don't think there will be many people?except in the extreme areas?who will not get their papers" by Monday.
It was also a pain getting copies of the Journal-Constitution to distribution points, Huguley added. In some cases, when drivers had arrived at stores with bundles of newspapers to drop off, the outlets had been closed because of the snow.
"It's difficult," he said. "Our people know how to cope with it. It's not that we have had a lot of experience [with this kind of weather], but we have a pretty good plan of action here. We really have an obligation to get our papers out, and to make sure there is a good supply."
Huguley expected the Journal-Constitution's normal Sunday circulation of just over 700,000 to be off considerably for March 14 because of single-copy distribution problems (one-third of total Sunday circulation is single-copy), but he hoped that by Monday rack and newsstand sales would recover.
Despite the crummy weather, the Washington Post had a good day, according to Ted Lutz, business manager and vice president for circulation.
Roughly 95% of the Post's single-copy editions are sold in grocery and convenience stores, and "we did pretty well in a lot of those places," he related.
Some of the area's more remote neighborhoods may not have received their Sunday paper at the normal time, Lutz said. By the end of the day, approximately 80% of the paper's subscription and single-copy copies?900,000 copies in the Washington metropolitan area?had been delivered; another 10% to 15% was delivered Monday.
"Distributors were able to get to the plants to pick up the papers, and they got back out to their areas all right," but some of the carriers had "trouble getting out to meet their distributors or actually handling the route," he said.

The Big (Frozen) Apple
New Yorkers are used to harsh winters, hazardous driving conditions (not always related to weather) and other adversities. They have been said to possess a mythic resilience at times of misfortune, often laughing in the face of calamity.
One would assume they would blink nary an eye at such an affront by Mother Nature, but this storm managed to turn even Manhattan into a ghost town on a Saturday night.
Restaurants that normally have a wait were either empty or closed. City streets usually packed with traffic and weekend shoppers were solid white and desolate. Of course, supermarkets were busy, but even some of them were dark.
On a typical Saturday evening, the city's newsstands and markets are crammed with stacks upon stacks of the massive Sunday New York Times. But March 13?and even on Sunday?many outlets were not open. Consequently, the Times was harder to find than usual.
According to spokeswoman Nancy Neilsen, trucks were prepared to make their deliveries but, in some cases, when drivers went to drop off their bundles, nobody was there to receive them.
Some Sunday subscribers outside the city said they did not receive their Times until as late as Tuesday morning.
Neilsen pointed out that the newspaper "covers a large geographic area compared to other papers that have a more localized delivery." She added that, whereas it normally takes a driver four hours to deliver papers, the storm created a 13-hour workday for some.
The Times advertising department is giving credits on some bills, Neilsen said. "That's still being sorted out."
Times metro editor Gerald Boyd said the news staff worked "very long and very hard" to cover the storm from bureaus in upstate New York, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.
"We have people who live in the region, so that gave us the ability to look at the story [insofar] as its regional impact without having to deploy a lot of people from New York," he related.
Some editorial and production staffers who reside outside the city were put up in a Manhattan hotel overnight, according to Neilsen and Boyd.
The Times committed "considerable reporting resources" to the blizzard story, Boyd said, but a couple of factors made the job especially difficult.
"We weren't just looking at a snow story," the editor explained, noting that the area was also plagued with ice, sleet and severe coastal flooding. (The Long Island and New Jersey shorelines had been devastated by a violent northeaster last December, and the March 13 storm further ravaged beachfronts and damaged homes.)
Besides the weather, there was other news to be covered, Boyd continued?including, most notably, the paper's continuing probe into last month's World Trade Center explosion. "All kinds of leads and all kinds of dimensions" continue to surface in that story, he said.
As the storm finished terrorizing the states and moved into Canada, and folks began to dig their way out of the icy rubble, New Jersey's Record, in Hackensack, took the opportunity to reflect on its efforts during the disaster.
In a full-page spread on March 16, the paper declared, in bold type, "We haven't missed a day in 98 years. We don't expect to."
It continued, "You may not have received your mail this weekend. And you couldn't even go to the mall. But odds are you got the Record. Maybe a little later than usual . . . but it was there."