Hurricane Forces Several Fla. Papers to Print Elsewhere

By: Joe Strupp For the first time in its history, The Miami Herald was not printed in Miami Tuesday.

Thanks to Hurricane Wilma, which knocked out power to most of South Florida on Monday, the Knight Ridder daily had to be published hundreds of miles north in Tampa. "We basically e-mailed our newspaper to them and they printed it," Executive Editor Tom Fiedler said about the Tuesday edition, which published via The Tampa Tribune. "We are hoping to have papers to people by noon today."

The Herald was one of several papers in southeast Florida affected by Wilma-related power outages and damage, which began Monday morning and hit different locations at different times. Among others forced to rearrange their printing efforts were the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Palm Beach Post.

"We remain without power and haven't had power since mid-morning yesterday," said Post Publisher Tom Giuffrida. "We have a diesel generator that keeps the office building powered and we can switch it over to a single press run." He said the Post, which normally uses two of its four presses to put out the daily, had to print its entire 180,000 press run for Tuesday's editions on one printer.

"It was a long press run," the Post publisher said this morning, noting that the printing began at 10:30 p.m. Monday, about two hours earlier than usual, and did not finish until 6 a.m. Tuesday. "People got the paper anywhere from 3 a.m. to some who have still not gotten it." He said the same cycle may occur Tuesday night if power is not restored.

In Fort Lauderdale, the Sun-Sentinel had power to print at its Deerfield Beach publishing plant. But when the storm shredded off a protective membrane Monday on the printing press roof, causing water damage to the presses, the paper had to find another alternative, according to Publisher Bob Gremillion.

The publisher contacted the Orlando Sentinel, a fellow Tribune Company paper located some 200 miles away, which printed the Tuesday edition and then trucked it down to the Fort Lauderdale area Tuesday morning. Because it had to wait until Orlando's regular press finished, copies were not expected to reach many readers until noon.

The Sun-Sentinel also was unable to print the national edition of The New York Times on Tuesday, Gremillion said. He said the Times' closest printing plant in Lakeland, Fla., took over that task.

But that was not the only problem facing the Sun-Sentinel. Due to damage from the storm, which included several blown out windows, the entire newsroom has had to relocate to the Deerfield Beach site, Gremillion said. "My office was destroyed and it sucked out a bunch of windows and there is still no power or water there," he said from the alternative site today. "We have a fully functioning newsroom here."

At the Herald, editors planned early for Wilma, which struck most of the area on Monday, Fiedler said. Monday's paper was printed early Sunday night in Miami in an effort to get it out before the severe weather hit. Fiedler said the Sunday night deadline for copy was moved up and some readers received the Monday edition in the middle of the night. "If you went out to your lawn to get your paper at 1 a.m., you got it," he said.

Both the Palm Beach Post and the Sun-Sentinel also planned ahead with early Monday editions out Sunday night.

After the storm passed through on Monday, Fiedler said the Herald was able to cover the news, but when power went out in the early afternoon, the presses were stuck. Generators provided enough electricity to operate the newsroom, but not enough to print the Herald and el Nuevo Herald, its Spanish-language sister daily.

Through a deal with the Tampa Tribune, the Herald's Tuesday edition was electronically sent Monday night at about 7:15 p.m., Fiedler said. In Tampa, 300,000 copies of the Herald and 100,000 copies of el Nuevo Herald were loaded onto three tractor trailers for the six-hour drive to Miami, the editor said.

"This is the first time we have not been able to print in our building, including during all the other hurricanes, and Hurricane Andrew," said Fiedler, a 32-year Herald veteran.

Fiedler said the Herald also beefed up coverage on its Web site, as did other papers, which included a large number of blog-style posts. "We created a blogger team where people were assigned to basically get an interview and immediately blog it, and then pass it on to the person doing the feed for the story," he said. "They are essentially reporters? notes."