Apparently, the L.A. News Group newspapers still are struggling to publish.
This is Day 2 and it may be next week — Day 6 or 7, that is — before LANG’s overworked and underpowered (and shared) Unisys computer system comes up.
(See techie updates over at the Reporter-G blog.)
A former LANG layout editor told me the issue is MediaNews cheapness, using underpowered equipment in a system that ought to be just fine.
This person said Unisys is “the same system that the Wall Street Journal uses, by the way — so the problem is not on that end. It’s the simple fact that you can’t have eight separate newspapers running on two (small) servers, and expect to pull that off night after night. This was a disaster waiting to happen. — Too cheap for their own good, as we all knew.”
I’m looking at today’s Press-Telegram sports section, and it appears the LANG papers were able to cobble together something resembling a professional cover — but it also lacks ANY local presence.
Thus, probably every LANG paper from the Daily News to San Bernardino has the same sports cover. But no local content. Because they were unable to get time to juggle in some local stuff, I’d assume.
Long Beach has its local sports stuff spread everywhere except its sports front. The Long Beach State men’s NCAA volleyball match is stripped across the top of the A section (which has no “mast reefers”, as they generally are known) … and columnist Doug Krikorian, Long Beach State baseball and some high school stuff all are on one page deep in the sports section.
Presumably, other LANG papers were able to collect their local stuff somewhere — just not display it in a way they would and should.
Someone who was working Wednesday night, when the Unisys system crashed, described a chaotic scene, calling it “the night from hell” and faulting puzzled technical people who “kept us hanging all night” before they realized the problem was bigger than they were.
They then were instructed to build the section on Quark … but in most newsrooms the number of people who knew how to use the other system were limited — or nonexistent. In papers such as Ontario and San Bernardino, the sports sections were complete disasters, lacking everything from box scores to local content.
What is sad is … the Unisys collapse means the already diminished and demoralized news staffs at LANG newspapers aren’t even being allowed a fair shot at putting out quality work. When your tools don’t function, you can’t do a job. And the LANG survivors, many of them young and inexperienced, can’t be faulted for not knowing how to improvise a newspaper at midnight. Especially when they are so poorly and callously led.
What is funny is … a lifetime San Bernardino-area native asked me, yesterday, what I thought would happen to The Sun, which he has noticed spiraling downward. And I told him there was a real chance it would cease publication.
Little did I know it could all but happen this week … without Singleton actually planning it.
4 responses so far ↓
1 DPope // May 2, 2008 at 3:25 PM
I’ve got to be honest — it’s hard not to laugh. I know it’s a terrible thing to say so but… what a complete clusterf*ck! They must be dropping subscribers like flies.
2 cindy robinson // May 3, 2008 at 9:05 AM
Like you said, it’s sad for the young, inexperience who have no leaders because the leaders were all let go. Haven’t seen the papers, but I got to believe it looks worst than a high school paper. The young only know computer-generated pages, imagine them trying to build a page from hard copy, let alone an agate page…
3 The Silver Streak // May 3, 2008 at 12:44 PM
Consider this thought.
Four or five years ago, an investor or bond holder could pretty much ignore what an ex-employee might say. So long as returns were in the high teens or twenties, who cares what some proverbila ink-stained wretch might think.
Now, however, you see something like this crash happen and you can’t ignore questions about managerial competence. If you were an investor, partner, advertiser, or at a bank holding notes, you would probably have to give some credibility and have some questions about what is raised on this blog and what Reporter G is saying. Even if half of what Reporter G is writing is wrong – and my guess is he is more accurate than that –
the half which is right would be scary.
This would also affect how management would do things. The led the “failure to publish was not an option” is whistling in a graveyard. Of course you have to get out something, because you would lose income for that day and you would lose the trust of advertisers.
I do feel sad for people working there, but I feel sadder for older people – maybe that is because I am over 50. The younger people are able to get out easier. And in five years, I probably wouldn’t have that much sympathy for younger people working at those papers – people should have enough sense not to manufacture buggy whips and rotary dial phones.
4 Insider // May 3, 2008 at 8:06 PM
When you cut to the chase, the real problem with the LANG newspapers downfall (and industry wide for that matter) is that this failure sits on the lap of management’s inability to allow those professionals that they hired to do a specific job, do it. Not the cheap spending on computer equipment.
We all know space is limited and that stories have to be trimmed, and that is ok, but rewording a sentence, graph, or even a whole story by a person who not only was not at the scene, but has no real insight to the story without the writer, is just old fashioned and old school. Why are editors telling paginators how to layout and design, who is the up-to-date skilled professional here? Why is a paginator selecting photography for a story? Especially when they don’t have the training that the photographers do, (Photography and visual journalism is a whole different monster).
Management, who are far from being in touch with it’s community, should actually listen to those who are in touch with the readers… reporters & photographers. You don’t hire to fill a position, you search and hire for the right person that fits the position.
Thanks for the micro-management.
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