Power Outage Knocked Out Honolulu Dailies

By: Joe Strupp A storm-related power outage that struck Friday, and briefly affected a vacationing Barack Obama, kept the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin from publishing regularly on Saturday, according to an Advertiser story Sunday that sought to show that other news outlets also were affected.

? ? major print and television outlets that traditionally rely on electricity to produce a newspaper or broadcast turned to Web capabilities,? the story said. ?KSSK, one of two designated O'ahu emergency broadcasters, went to emergency generators and almost immediately began nonstop coverage, at about 6:30 p.m. Mike Buck, who hosts a talk show on sister Clear Channel Hawaii station KHVH, walked across the hall to lend a hand to KSSK assistant program director Steve Storm and began fielding phone calls.?

?At the two ends of South Street, the biggest challenge for staffers of The Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin was getting a print edition out for yesterday,? the Sunday story said. ?At The Advertiser, resources were thrown into ensuring the Web site kept up to date with the latest.The paper's Kapolei printing plant lost power at about 8:30 p.m., and did not get it back until 4 a.m. yesterday.?

"Our printing plant is so intricate that even though power returned, it took four or five hours to synchronize the system, replace burned-out sensors and make calls to our German manufacturer," said Advertiser Editor Mark Platte. "By that time, we concluded that it didn't make sense to put out a limited-run newspaper and instead to concentrate on the Sunday edition."

The Advertiser added that this marked the first time since Dec. 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor and other parts of O'ahu were bombed, that no print edition of that paper was published.

?The online edition of the newspaper, however, included files of the Saturday edition pages "just the way they would have looked in print," Platte said in the story.

Readers with access to the Web ?received a steady stream of online posts nonstop from the time of the outage.?

At the Star-Bulletin, ?late in the evening, a decision was made to keep a skeleton crew at work on the Web site through the early morning and then return a larger crew to put out a later-than-usual Saturday edition,? the story said.

"The idea was we wanted to do something (in print) but obviously it would be really challenging," said Editor Frank Bridgewater. "But we felt the need to publish something."

By 6 a.m., power had been restored to both the Star-Bulletin newsroom at Restaurant Row and the paper's Kane'ohe printing press, he said.

A 16-page edition, including news from all four sections, went to press by late Saturday morning and was delivered to subscribers between Pearl City and East Honolulu, and Windward O'ahu, ?a majority of Star-Bulletin subscribers,? Bridgewater said in the story.