Luck, Planning Let NY Papers Publish in Dark City

By: Jim Rosenberg It's hard to believe that only two weeks ago, much of the Northeast was in the dark. Now that New York City's newspapers have had a chance to recover, E&P Online looked at how the three regionally circulated Manhattan-based dailies with remote production and distribution facilities managed to get papers on the streets of a largely blacked-out city on Aug. 15.

At The New York Times, "it was a case where luck and preparation came together," said Corporate Communications Vice President Catherine J. Mathis. Her assessment echoed those from other papers in other affected markets. At The Globe and Mail in Toronto, which also relies on remote print sites, Operations Vice President Andy Ritchie not only credited "outstanding" work by his paper's and contract printer's employees, but also conceded that "a few hits of luck really help." (See E&P Online, Aug. 25.)

The Times' huge plants in the city's Queens borough and in Edison, N.J., "both went down," said Mathis -- briefly in Edison and for 21 hours at the College Point plant in Queens. All production went to Edison, which printed approximately 750,000 copies in a double run. First, sections that were less time sensitive (e.g., World Business, Escapes) were printed and wound onto Muller Martini storage wheels; later, when pages were ready, the presses delivered a longer run of the main news section and sports. After that, they resumed printing those other, often advance-printed sections.

As a result, said Mathis, not everyone received a complete package -- everyone got the news, but some only got the news. Those lacking other sections received them later, she said.

Three diesel generators powered the lobby, data center, some newsroom workstations, and all safety lighting in the Times' 43rd Street building. Newsroom and prepress staffers could write, edit, paginate, and send page files to Edison and to national-edition print sites around the country -- few of which were affected by the blackout. When printing was interrupted at The Ann Arbor (Mich.) News, the Times moved to a Chicago-area printer, then completed the run in Ann Arbor when power was restored, said Mathis.

The Times had to redeploy delivery trucks from Queens to New Jersey, but that was long after the hours-long exodus of commuters from Manhattan. "Distribution was somewhat less of an issue," Mathis said, noting that getting back into Manhattan late at night was far easier than leaving the island in the hours after the power failed. Newsstands that were open, she added, were selling out of newspapers.

The Daily News also had "very little trouble" getting in and around the city, said Chief Operating Officer Les Goodstein. With the order for outbound-only Hudson River tunnel traffic lifted in the wee hours, papers could be hauled directly into Manhattan from the paper's Jersey City production plant just across New York Harbor -- unlike 9-11, he said, when "our trucks had to go [40 miles north] to the Tappan Zee [Bridge] and back down again" into the city.

Still, in recognition of the blackout's effect on transportation hubs, the tabloid had to "rearrange our distribution scheme." Realizing that far fewer readers, after all, would be commuting to work on Friday morning, the Daily News emphasized delivery to the outer boroughs and suburbs, said Goodstein.

Although overcome by planning and hard work, "We had our problems," Goodstein conceded, adding, "I wasn't sure until 8:30, 9 o'clock [Thursday night] that we would get out a paper." The plant that looks out on the Statue of Liberty was fortunate to be in the first section of the area's grid to get power again. Goodstein said management had considered sending page files to print at another company that he declined to identify.

Ultimately, the Libertyview plant printed about a million copies of its 48-page Friday edition. As for advertising, Goodstein said "we were successful in moving a lot of that business into our Saturday paper, which ran to 144 pages."

But in the dark metropolis across the water, news and prepress had two to three hours of diesel fuel available for a generator able to supply about 30% of the building's usual power requirement. "We were up against that time constraint, as well," said Goodstein.

The Daily News building on 33rd Street lost power, got it back with an uninterrupted power system using two-hour batteries, then lost it again when the diesel generator did not kick in. A never-implemented "Plan B" for the newsroom involved using a back-up system at its 33rd Street location and/or setting up another newsroom in New Jersey -- but just getting there could have taken several hours.

"We did some very fancy wire work" and got the generator operating, Goodstein said. "Finally, at 10 o'clock, the newsroom system came back to life," and the Friday edition "came together in two hours," he said.

With its new plant in the borough of the Bronx, the New York Post also looked to Jersey for printing. North Jersey Media Group added the Post to its numerous other jobs that night and the next. For the parent company of The Record in Bergen County, the blackout amounted to "a real-world test" of an emergency plan completed only about a month before. The plan, in fact, was a complete overhaul of an earlier one, and was occasioned by a catastrophic "sequential failure of prepress systems" back in May that effectively shut down production.

North Jersey Media President Jonathan H. Markey said a study of the May meltdown "pointed to gaps in our process," that the company learned from the event, and it rebuilt its disaster-recovery plan accordingly. With its headquarters and flagship in Hackensack, the smaller Herald News based in West Paterson, and its large commercial printing plant even farther west in Rockaway, the company has interdependent operations in three counties. So another aspect of its redesigned emergency preparedness was creating the ability "to move pages and images around using more pipelines" than were available before.

It all worked that Thursday and Friday, when company and customer newspapers ordinarily printed in Hackensack rolled off presses in Rockaway.

For North Jersey Media's two dailies, Markey said he decided that if by 7 p.m. power was not on again at both sites, the papers would publish a consolidated edition, with Herald News editorial and classified staffers moving from West Paterson to Hackensack. The move was made (although West Paterson would later get electricity again first) to Hackensack, which had an "almost brand-new" uninterruptible power system, driven by a diesel generator, able to support about 40% of the editorial system and the Autologic OMAN system for transmitting page files.

Meanwhile, an hour west in Rockaway, the commercial plant "did have an open window on our D press," said Commercial Printing Division Vice President Charlie Whitehead, referring to part of his doublewide Mitsubishi equipment. Two small weeklies already on press were completed, then a Record preprint was run until the crew needed to make ready for the paper's mainsheet, shortly before midnight. Some slack was provided by the cancellation of The Jersey Journal's regular contract print run owing to the Jersey City daily's inability to send page files. American Bond Buyer also would not be printed.

The Mitsubishi C press was running a USA Today preprint, and when Gannett "lost power in their Westchester [N.Y.] plant, they increased their draw from 100,000 to 160,000," Whitehead said. When that was completed, the same press took over Investor's Business Daily, which ordinarily is printed on the TKS press back in Hackensack. Though IBD's page files, said Whitehead, were "still routed through Hackensack" for computer-to-plate output on the customer's own platesetters, Hackensack redirected the files through its system to Autologic 3850 film imagesetters in Rockaway, where plates were output in conventional manner. IBD went on press at 9 p.m. Fifty-four minutes and 58,000 copies later, "we made ready for the main USA Today" run, said Whitehead.

Four hours earlier, the New York Post called, asking if it, too, could be squeezed out of Rockaway. With nothing slated for its singlewide MAN Roland Uniset press after 10 p.m., the plant ran 188,000 48-page copies of the Post, which had power only to send page files. The next day, the Post requested 455,000 copies of a 96-page edition, which was run on both the MAN and Mitsubishi presses. It also asked for Rockaway to stand by for a Sunday edition run, which proved unnecessary. Nevertheless, recalled Whitehead, "We brought in all the staff just in case they didn't get it back."

The doublewide Mitsubishi D press handles a web size suitable for the same tabloid work done on the singlewide MAN press, according to Whitehead. Setting up to split the job between two different presses posed no problem, according to Markey, who said that "with the [ppi Media] software, you can impose pages for different page positions automatically."

Since the Post resumed printing in the Bronx, Charlie Whitehead now worries only about printing its weekly television program guide.