Small Miracles Allowed Blackout Publishing

By: Jim Rosenberg Updated at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Sept. 4

Early one day recently, Chris Wade, production director of The Meadville Tribune, was reviewing his disaster-recovery plan with colleagues at the New Castle News, a CNHI sister paper also in western Pennsylvania. He couldn't believe what happened after his drive back north: The lights went out.

Wade's disaster plan, in effect since mid-December, covers all departments, "and everybody followed it to a T," he said, after the August 14 blackout. But the Tribune was luckier than many others. Not only did it have and execute a plan when power went out that afternoon, but Wade, also an assistant fire chief, borrowed a 12-kilowatt generator from the fire department to power his paper.

By 9 p.m., electricity was restored, and "about 2:30 we finally got on the press," said Wade. "Usually we get on by midnight."

Where newspapers were affected at all, the impact of last week's regional power failure depended on location, publishing cycle, and the nature of individual operations.

In western New York, The Daily News, in Batavia, an evening daily, was not affected at all. But Batavia's 18-unit Goss Urbanite is responsible for more than just the 13,945-circulation paper. It also prints on contract approximately 72,000 copies of USA Today. And when the lights went out, said Production Manager Dale Kurasiewicz, "we were in the process of producing a special section for USA Today that was to be inserted into the paper that night."

A backup site, Tribune-Review Publishing Co.'s Warrendale, Pa., plant, wound up printing the special sections. "We lost revenue from the whole insert run that we didn't print," Kurasiewicz said. With pressroom and mailroom crews remaining at the plant on overtime, the press was replated for USA Today's main sections.

To the west, Detroit Newspapers had to call on The Indianapolis Star to put ink on paper for its Detroit Free Press. Cleveland also looked south for production, sending editors and drivers to the Akron Beacon Journal to print and take out The Plain Dealer. Those two dailies, along with the Vindicator, in Youngstown, and The Repository, in Canton, have a longstanding agreement to lend emergency production assistance to one another.

The Plain Dealer had no generator to run presses at its suburban plant. Akron's Knight Ridder daily had a generator but never needed it, because power wasn't out for more than a second before it "came right back up," said Marketing Communications Director John S. Murphy.

Akron, the home town of FirstEnergy -- the big utility under intense scrutiny for the blackout and much other recent bad news -- was dark, with the paper a rare exception, along with some municipal buildings and hospitals. FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin said a special section of the power supply, probably with locally generated electricity, that serves those facilities was created "a number of years ago in the event of something like this happening." Some at the paper speculate that when John S. Knight was still running the paper and building his namesake chain, he had the pull to ensure that his presses always had power.

The Beacon Journal printed most of the Plain Dealer's average weekday circulation that night, including 100,000 copies as a third run on a press that had just finished printing the main section of the Beacon Journal, according to Printing Manager Vicki Kuhns. "We basically brought up the papers side by side," said Kuhns. Before 5:30 a.m., 334,000 copies of the PD's Friday edition had rolled off the presses, with four-color on Page One and in a full-page ad. The Beacon Journal ordinarily circulates just over 141,000 of its own weekday copies." With both titles running, each used two distribution docks.

The PD had done its classified dump back in Cleveland before the lights went out, meaning it had page films imaged for offset litho -- the reverse of what is required by the Beacon Journal's plate-to-paper flexo press. Kuhns said her paper had time to scan the negatives and reverse the page images before making plates. Readers received their first flexo-printed, virtually rub-free Plain Dealers.

But the Plain Dealer's Friday edition ordinarily runs to well over 400,000 copies. PD Ad Services Manager Fran Scarlett reported that after some initial difficulty transmitting from Akron, pages were delivered to American Color Graphics, in nearby Medina, which picked up the slack by printing another 97,000 copies.

To the north, The Globe and Mail in Toronto could not generate sufficient power to support its main, 330-seat editorial system, but it was prepared to move generator-powered newsroom computers into conference rooms. In the midst of changing from a Harris to a CCI Europe, the Canadian national daily was able to run the older, familiar front end.

While content was crafted for an abbreviated, ad-free edition by reporters working on laptops and editors working by flashlight, the three computer rooms had fully uninterrupted power supplies and were "100% backed up by generator," preserving file continuity and ensuring transmission of pages in Portable Document Format (PDF), said Operations Vice President Andy Ritchie. "Designed to handle everything from bitmaps to PDF," he said, the transmission system alone is housed in a $1.4 million room outfitted for satellite, T1 line, or Internet delivery.

"A huge amount of money has been spent on systems over the past four years," and the paper always made sure to buy back-up capability, said Ritchie. The main building is supplied by one local electricity grid and, about a mile-and-a-half away, its Internet operations are supplied by another. While some thought both operations could use one site if the other went down, the team responsible for disaster recovery "never felt that was enough [protection] anyway," said Ritchie.

The paper may have had backup, but its local printer did not. Probably alone among all other major dailies, the G&M relies entirely on commercial printing (unlike USA Today and The New York Times National Edition, which can also print at some of their parent companies' other newspapers).

With its suburban-Toronto print site unable to operate, the paper's contract printer, Transcontinental Inc., arranged to take up the slack at several of its Quebec plants, then truck the copies to Ontario. Before the Toronto-area plant had power again at 1 a.m., Transcontinental even had its new La Presse plant "plated up and ready to go" in a baptism of fire for the Heidelberg Mainstream presses that are not even slated for live production until next month. But by then, 90,000 copies had been shipped from Quebec and no more were needed, said Ritchie. Those plants also printed another 60,000 copies for circulation in Quebec and Ontario's Ottawa region.

Carriers had copies delivered by 6 a.m., and "nearly double the [usual] number of copies for Toronto were on the street Friday morning," said Ritchie. For the 50-page edition, he added, "our sale on the day was one of the biggest ever."