Apocalypse averted as Y2K slides in, 'be prepared' pays off

Year 2000 was a "piece of cake" precisely because, as Jack Stanley, senior vice president of operations and technology at the Houston Chronicle said, the newspaper industry spent "three years of sweat" on solving the problems beforehand.

Stanley and a half-dozen other industry executives were all in a pretty good mood on Monday, Jan. 3. The newspaper industry -- hell, the entire country, the entire planet -- had dodged the mass-computer-crash bullet.

The apocalypse of Year 2000 didn't happen. Newspapers published, electricity throbbed, water flowed and the world pretty much went on as before. That's not to say the new year arrived without glitches (see Page 3), and there was still an inclination to do a little Monday-morning-quarterbacking on the whole thing.

"We spent a fortune on consultants who worried our leaders half to death and never fixed a single line of code," remarked Stanley. He said that newspapers should have given the money that went to consultants "to the people who really did the work."

Nonetheless, as Ed Pieratt, director of technology for Scripps Newspapers of Cincinnati (publishers of 20 daily papers around the country, including the 351,000-circulation Denver Rocky Mountain News and the 104,000-circulation Cincinnati Post), recalled, newspapers began pressing their suppliers as far back as 24 months ago. "This two-year window did put pressure on the vendors," he said.

The notion of getting the suppliers' attention was a reoccurring theme. "We held -- especially -- our newspaper-specific vendors' feet to the flame and demanded that they provide solutions for even our oldest systems," said Christopher Caneles, corporate information systems director of the Sacramento-based McClatchy Co., publishers of 11 newspapers, including the 407,000-circulation Minneapolis paper The Star-Tribune and the 264,000-circulation Sacramento Bee.

"There are still a lot of old publishing systems out there," Caneles pointed out.

Randy Jessee, director of news systems at Norfolk, Va.'s 241,000-circulation The Virginian-Pilot, agreed. "The flags started flying more than two years ago," he said. "We had a lot to do, but I think we got busy, checked out our weak spots and got things done."

Caneles was concerned about time as recently as last month. "A few weeks ago, I would have said we weren't prepared early enough, because some of us were still attacking issues late in the year, rather than being in true maintenance mode.

"Now, looking back, preparation was 'early enough.'"

But not everyone felt two years was sufficient lead time. "The information was a little late in coming at first, but I believe we did catch up with the need as an industry," said Steve Hannah, vice president of information technologies at Gazette Communications of Cedar Rapids, Iowa (publishers of the 71,000-circulation Cedar Rapids Gazette).

Hannah, who says that the Gazette started preparations in 1994, thinks some papers probably ended up spending more money than necessary because of this lag in Y2K concerns.

Generally, though, industry executives believe that Y2K spending was a lot like pants -- you want them long enough to reach the floor. In other words, spend as much as you need, but not too much.

"I would say we did not over-prepare," said Charles Cooper, managing editor for production at the 476,000-circulation Newark, N.J. paper The Star-Ledger. "Boy Scout motto provides for a quiet Jan. 3, 2000 morning."

Scripps' Pieratt says he doesn't know that anyone could have made the call on whether the industry dropped too much cash without putting a good deal of the money toward figuring out how extensive the problems were. "I think being conservative and spending more was a better approach than underestimating the problems," Pieratt said.

Norfolk's Jessee points out that "there was no way out if we didn't" spend. "As time went on," Jessee said, "it became more and more clear that we were unlikely to have major collapses of the power grids. But if, because of Y2K or terrorism or an ice storm, the power grid had collapsed and the generator hadn't been sitting beside the building, we would have been in a heap of trouble."

Jessee said that Y2K afforded newspapers the opportunity to invest in disaster planning. "Newspapers have been notorious for talking about backup plans but not spending any money on them. Now we have done it, been ready, had the resources. The pieces are in place. We've got what we need to get through a great many disasters -- we didn't have those things before," Jessee said.

Cedar Rapids' Hannah concurred. "I don't believe you could really over-plan." If anything, Hannah said, maybe we as an industry didn't share enough information on backup planning.

This was a sentiment echoed by McClatchy's Caneles. "Our industry trade associations did not do enough to help us," he said. "They could have been clearinghouses for crucial vendor information."

Caneles also cited the Y2K scare as an opening to "update existing disaster recovery plans and look at potential disasters in a new light."

The big night
For the night of Dec. 31-Jan. 1, most newspapers staffed up. "Even 'the suits' were here -- and we had walkie-talkies," chuckled Houston's Stanley. "It was lots of fun."

Planning at The Virginian-Pilot was extensive. Jessee said his staff came up with a plan to print in the event of a loss of electricity at its downtown offices. They brought in a new generator for its remote printing plant and set up an emergency newsroom there as well (it was a small system from Atex Media Solutions Inc. with a wire feed, nine terminals and four Apple Macintosh computers). In addition, the paper printed its main edition early (with the copy desk coming in at 11 a.m. and leaving at 7 p.m.) and brought in a second copy desk shift at 10 p.m. to produce an eight-page extra that closed at 2:30 a.m. Carriers wrapped the extra around the earlier printed edition and the delivery deadline was extended to 8:30 a.m.

Cedar Rapids printed throughout the midnight hour and then produced a wrapper at 2 a.m. Both Scripps and McClatchy papers printed earlier editions which were then supplemented with after-midnight news (with the exception of the Denver Rocky Mountain News).

The Star-Ledger had shipped complete Saturday newspapers to its two remote printing plants by 11 p.m., with the understanding that they were emergency editions in case of "big, big problems," said Cooper.

Editorial and production also had a number of contingency plans for how many of the advance Saturday pages to use in the event of different kinds of glitches, Cooper said, with the ability to hold until 2 a.m. to start the press. The pages had complete Y2K coverage as far west as London, but were never used.

Most newspapers fed their overnighters -- the offerings ranged from soda pop and pizza to more elegant fare (see marginalia, Page 2). As it became clear that Y2K problems weren't happening in the time zones affected earliest, moods at the newspapers lifted. Then, when it became apparent that there would be no terrorism stories with which to deal, papers even got joyous.

"The mood was extremely upbeat," said Cooper. "We shipped pages to plants at 12:01 a.m. in both scanned and direct mode to make sure we were totally connected. After this smooth exchange, we felt even better," Cooper said.

In Norfolk, reports Jessee, "everybody was pretty relaxed" after the successful rollover across the world. With the exception, of course, of "the front-end system guys -- like me." Jessee said that he and his colleagues "were antsy" but that he had rolled over the paper's spare Atex system to Jan. 1, 2000 "so many times that I knew nothing would go wrong."

Caneles, who was in touch with all 11 McClatchy papers, said: "Everyone I talked to was in good spirits, although the Information Systems Group was getting bored, I think, since everything was working."

David Dalton, a long-time editor and newspaper technologist who is system director at the 104,000-circulation evening San Francisco Examiner, summed up the Y2K experience for many U.S. newspapers.

"In some ways on the morning after," Dalton said, "it feels like overkill."

And what if we had it to do over again? "I think I'd still do everything just as we did it," he said.

Y2K compliance, Dalton noted, was only part of the payoff. He cited "a nice new infrastructure" that will bring other benefits to his newspaper: "a zingy new network with all-new wiring and big, burly routers; a front-end system that, though still proprietary and brain-dead, at least speaks IP [Internet protocol] on the network; an archiving system that can speak to other systems on the network, both for input and output, and a server environment built on [Sun Microsystems'] Solaris that gives us the ability to mangle text streams with [the scripting language] Perl and FTP things around between systems."

Other newspaper executives have pointed out that many papers not only replaced old proprietary systems to become Y2K-compliant, but that when they were done, outdated systems that did galley or block type had been supplanted with systems that did whole-page makeup.

In other words, Dalton said, Y2K brought to his newspaper -- and, he assumed, the vast majority of U.S. newspapers -- something it had not had before.

"In a word, standards."

-- dmc

"Under the rules of the Gregorian Calendar, it is a leap year (adding Feb. 29) every four years except if the leap year
falls on a new century such as 1900, then it is not. But every four centuries, it becomes a leap year again. So if the year can be divided evenly by 400 (like 2000 can) it does become a leap year. So 2000 is a leap year and has a Feb. 29."
-- Stuart Anderson, IT director of the Gulf News, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the IFRA Y2K Early Warning System, explaining the Next Big Problem.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.