I happened to be in San Bernardino this morning, and I saw the mess of a paper that was thrown on people’s doorsteps.

I didn’t know it was an L.A. News Group-wide problem-cum-disaster until I got this link from Reporter G.

He is a former staffer at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, and has good sources and is following the developments closely.

Here is the link to his site.

It gets better. Turns out, Dean Singleton himself is in town today, and he can look at the wrecks of newspapers his LANG crews turned out. The best they could do, I’m sure.

As if LANG needed something like this. It has plummeting circulation throughout the group, and then to throw newspapers on people’s doors made up of house ads, random feature stories, no comics, no sports agate … well, this isn’t going to help sell papers.

I recommend returning to reporter-G (he’s on my blog roll) throughout the night for more updates.

One more thought about technical disasters. I’ve been involved with them before, and not all were about MediaNews. Sometimes a key system goes down, and you don’t get it back, and weird stuff happens. I can remember one time we had to go to the arch-rival Press Enterprise to get some type. And at least one or two nights we came close to not publishing — generally because our pagination system failed, back in the early days.

I imagine a big problem this time is having the entire productio0n side going through a system called “Unisys.” It’s even the front-end system some reporters use. If that crashed … well, they’re pretty much screwed.