Courier-Journal nightmare

How can you not have a contingency plan? This is probably as bad as not publishing the day after Thanksgiving.

 

Great Hunter S. Thompson reference...

 

I'm sure the editorial chastising British Petroleum for not doing more to plan for or prevent an oil rig explosion was missed.

 

They're getting ripped on the message board indeed, but I wonder, I mean, how much can you do to plan for something like this? There are references to new presses and problems with them, and questions about backup generators. In 20 years in newspapers, I never worked for a paper that didn't publish -- but I still don't know if there was something humanly possible C-J management could have done that would have prevented this.

 

This is absolutely the Worst Case Scenerio. The biggest thing of every year in your town for the last 136 years, which happens to be the biggest event in its sport, and one of the signature sports events in the world, and you can't print the paper. No same-day backup plan? Wow. A shame.

 

the one thing i can't figure out is why it would take all afternoon to get the paper printed and not delivered until monday?
the indy star likely ended its press run around 2 a.m. and i doubt it has a bunch of work to do sunday morning.
so you could ship pages to indy and get the presses up and running by 5.
you're only printing the first 4 sections so why would it not be feasible to get the paper out to the readers sunday afternoon?
you're only talking about a couple hundred thousand papers, which would be finished in less than 2 hours.
and the delivery people would just go back out sunday afternoon to deliver the product?
it's a similar plan papers in hurricane areas use.
unless they don't want to pay overtime and more to the delivery teams?

what if you only get the sunday paper, are they going to deliver the paper to you on monday even though you don't get a monday paper?

and the report about the state of the newspaper in the same edition is just comical.

 

Gannett is playing with fire centralizing their desks and operations. I've got to think the LCJ advertising department is going to have to give make-goods.

 

Meaning how many layoffs are coming?

 

Wow. Can't imagine how bad that must have been. Odd that they didn't try to get help from either Cincinnati or Indy, both Gannett papers within a few hours.

 

What a disaster.

I wonder if my original shop across the river (the two Indiana dailes competed when I was there, but are now all but merged) ramped up their copies to take advantage? Knowing them ... probably not.