Months of planning, testing nudge Y2K bug into a corner

"If we have a fax machine that fails" on Jan. 1, 2000, one East Coast system editor predicted, "we can send a copy clerk out to buy a new one."

As it stands now, that may prove to be the only errand that technology types will have to arrange New Year's Day, when the millennium bug leaves its cocoon and "99" turns into "2000."

Asked for Y2K status reports, system shepherds at six U.S. dailies said similar things -- they're doing OK. If they're at all representative of the newspaper industry in general, publishers will have cause for genuine celebration on New Year's Day 2000.

"We think we're in good shape," said Doug Bevins, systems editor of The Record-Journal (28k, morning) of Meriden, Conn. For more than a year, his paper has worked to "erase the Y2K concerns" by upgrading just about everything.

"The timeline on Y2K matters calls for completion of everything in classified and display and the newsroom and business by ... I believe it's July," Bevins said.

July seems to be the outside date for installing and testing software and hardware for Y2K compliance. Newsday has carved two milestones for 1999.

The first goal "is to have every system compliant by March 31," said Phil Rugile, information systems director at the 572,000-circulation morning tabloid. This includes legacy classified and editorial systems from Atex Media Solutions Inc. of Bedford, Mass. -- even as Newsday hauls in a brand new newsroom and production solution from Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa.

"That was our goal for all our major systems," Rugile said -- providing a secure backup. "Even if we are fairly certain they won't be here, 'fairly sure' isn't good enough."

Extensive testing of these and other systems will culminate in June with a "faux press run," he said, "where we produce yesterday's edition in its entirety, right out through our distribution system."

Getting to that point will require probing many a nook and cranny for skittery bugs aplenty. In eastern Nebraska, the Omaha World-Herald (220k, all day) rolled in Y2K-compliant software and then subjected its circulation system to 97 tests of functionality.

Editorial? It was on the receiving end of 227 tests, said Bill Davis, the paper's special projects director and companywide Year 2000 chaperone. "There's just a ton of stuff we're going through," he said -- including money.

"We have not predicted what it's going to cost the company to do Y2K," Davis said. This year's budget includes $250,000 for Year 2000 expenditures -- "but that does not include the time of the people we're taking out of their regular jobs," he said, referring to seven project managers at work companywide.

Other publishers have calculated their Y2K costs more specifically. Pulitzer Publishing Co. told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it will shell out $11.5 million just to make its flagship St. Louis Post-Dispatch (330k, morning) shipshape on 1/1/2000, according to Production Systems Manager Dan McGuire.

Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Co. notified the SEC its costs would top $46 million -- $35 million for systems and $11 million for expenses. Along the way, Times Mirror told the government agency it was confident it could solve the Y2K puzzle.

Of course, things could go wrong, in which case "the Company may not be able to prepare its publications in a timely manner, which could have a material adverse effect on the Company's results of operations."

Planning. Scheduling. Testing. Spending. Fretting.

What's the big deal? After all, in systems offices everywhere, 1/1/2000 will be just another day.

The paper must come out.

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3
"Those who haven't started testing are in for a surprise," said Davis. Three months ago, he discovered his freshly minted publishing solution had a problem not with 2000, but 1999.

"Everything rolled over fine on editorial, but on classified we ended up having a billing problem," Davis said. "Our files would expire -- we couldn't find them when we went to bill."

The system is made by Harris Publishing Systems Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., which is installing a 57-seat classified alley and a 160-seat editorial system at the World-Herald. The glitch was discovered in late October when a test system was rolled ahead to Jan. 1, 2000.

"When we put in the 12/1/99 date, it started incrementing all of the classified ads by one day. When we backed that out, we found out that it was actually a Jan. 1, 1999, problem," Davis said. Phone calls to Harris yielded "an easy fix -- it was in just one piece of their coding."

Tests on a sales force automation system, which Davis did not identify, uncovered critical problems in its software. After setting the date for 2000, test users did routine tasks. "Anything that we put in new in the year 2000, we could run reports on," he said. "Anything that we tried to bring in from before, it wouldn't run reports on."

Roving reporters would have a problem with older laptops, Davis found. "They're not going to be upgradeable. They'll be OK for a one-way dropoff -- if you're just doing an ASCII dump, you could care less (about the date). But if you're going to log on from your laptop to your mainframe system, it could be a problem."

Upgrades were found necessary just about everywhere at the World-Herald. Scanner wands in the pressroom used to read bar codes on paper rolls had to be replaced. And the computerized heating and cooling system had to be upgraded -- it was running Windows 3.1.1.

"I'm absolutely amazed at all the things that fall under building facilities that have Y2K implications," Davis said, from security locks and cameras to maintenance management software. "You need to check everything," and thoroughly.

Joe Cillo couldn't agree more, especially when it comes to networks.

"The major emphasis is on, you gotta test," said the director of information systems of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. "You have to prove it to yourself as much as you can."

Validating Y2K compliance on networks, however, is tough stuff. They have to be tested in mini-networks, removed from the live system. "It's not feasible to change the date and move it up and move it back -- you lose files," Cillo said. "But we're not taking anything for granted, either."

Before beginning to install a 300-seat Harris NewsMaker system earlier this year, the Plain Dealer set up a test network using the new servers as they arrived. A complete production environment -- editorial, advertising, pagination -- generated page negatives just fine.

"We saw no problem with any of that," Cillo said, including the system's ability to handle Mac-generated ads. "The only thing we saw through that whole process was that there were a couple of pieces of equipment where we had to manually roll the date, and it accepted it and there was no problem."

While Cillo was at the halfway mark with his Harris installation, McGuire said his St. Louis team is between 65 percent and 75 percent done with all of their Y2K duties. They're well on the way to meeting an April 1 deadline "to be completely done with every Y2K issue," he said.

The Post-Dispatch is riding a forklift upgrade to Y2K compliance.

"In almost every instance, we have chosen not to upgrade systems or not to try to write code to fix old systems," McGuire said. "It's the absolute reason we're moving to Harris" in the newsroom, and away from a 15-year-old Atex system that is "reaching the end of its life cycle anyway."

Standard platforms and software are coming in building-wide. Workstations and servers supplied by Dell Computer will be loaded with the Microsoft Office suite for word processing and financial work by 90 percent of Post-Dispatch employees.

In Meriden, The Record-Journal is taking similar steps, adopting Office97 in lieu of Microsoft Word 6, Bevins said. The pagination workstations that run Quark XPress will be caught up later: "We're stalled on the Quark upgrade just because the XTensions we need are not yet written for Quark 4.0."

Standard does not necessarily mean trustworthy. When it comes to suppliers, McGuire said, "we don't take their word" that a machine or application is Y2K compliant. Echoed Cillo: "We do not accept any vendor's validation for compliance as gospel."

But their colleague in Las Vegas is less skeptical. Maybe it's the gambling environment in which he lives, but Terry Duck, director of information systems at the Las Vegas Review-Journal (151k, morning), is betting his suppliers are playing with a full deck.

"We probably won't do a wide variety of testing," he said. "We're basing our information on our suppliers and what they tell us."

The newsroom is Y2K A-OK -- it relies on a Mac-based system from Digital Technology International of Orem, Utah, which was upgraded in November -- but Atex has to upgrade an Enterprise advertising system installed just last year.

Once that's done, its interface to a Collier-Jackson business system (now made by Geac Publishing Systems of Tampa, Fla.) will have to be upgraded. And then when the C-J bugs get exterminated, Enterprise will have to be upgraded again, and they'll have to check things again.

"This stuff is not easy," Duck said.

Is the end in sight?

"We should be done by May with all of our systems."

People in the mix
Decades ago, a handful of computer programmers settled on a practice of using two digits to record the year. In the year ahead, uncountable people will work diligently to neutralize the fallout from that decision.

Just how many people varies among these six newspapers, but a couple have two or three full-time people on Y2K. In 1997, the Post-Dispatch hired two people "just for the testing portion of what we're doing," said McGuire, who is Y2K task force chairman for all of the Pulitzer Publishing Co. "We've got three people who are almost devoted full-time to this."

In Connecticut, Bevins thought for a moment about who was involved in Y2K issues, then said, "It's minimal, now that all the inventory-ing and questionnaire-ing is behind us." At this stage, "the bulk of the work falls upon the composing room people who have survived as the network managers under our transition from the old way of doing things," he said.

Larger papers, of course, have more people to whom they can hand their to-do lists. Newsday has a project manager, Rugile said, who will get assistance in each department of the paper as needed.

In Omaha, Davis oversees seven project managers who have distinct areas to monitor while also doing their full-time jobs. "Their main thing for the first six months of 1999 is Y2K," he said. Then he recited a list of equipment awaiting certification: PBX, voice mail, the predictive dialer in circulation, AT&T inbound and outbound, U S West outbound.

"That's one person's plate," Davis said, referring to one of his seven managers.

Some people at the Post-Dispatch have been working on the Y2K issue since 1995. There, and everywhere else, anyone involved knows he or she is participating in an unwelcome, and unique, episode in the Digital Age.

It has left them breathless, perhaps, but not speechless.

"If we had waited any longer," McGuire said, "I would have severe doubts about whether we could complete what have to complete. Thank goodness we started as early as we did."

While McGuire is proud of the progress made so far, he's realistic about 1/1/2000. "We've gone through this whole company with a microscope. Have we missed something? Probably."

In Omaha, Davis thinks it's time to lighten up.

"We need to get the more positive news stories, to where people are not going to have a run on cashing in their mutual funds," he said. "The older people could really get hurt if they fall into that trap of gloom and doom."

Gloom and doom is simply not permitted in Las Vegas, where the clear desert air gives Terry Duck an undistorted view of the Y2K problem. Within his digital universe, which revolves around Digital Technology International and Atex, bugs are a fact of life.

Y2K is just the most recent.

"Sometimes, you never get to the end of it," he sighed. "There are bugs in DTI that we've had from Day One, and -- I'm not picking on either of these guys -- we had bugs in our Atex system that we had for 13 years."

-- Pete Wetmore

Atex Media Solutions Inc., (781) 275-2323, e-mail: info@atex.com;
Digital Technology International, (801) 226-2984, e-mail: joann_froelich@dtint.com;
Geac Publishing Systems, (813) 872-9990, e-mail: vsinfo@geac.com;
Harris Publishing Systems Corp., (407) 242-5330, e-mail: jfitch@harris.com;
Microsoft Corp., (206) 882-8080, e-mail: donnaco@microsoft.com;
Quark Inc., (303) 894-8888, e-mail: quarktech@aol.com;
Unisys Corp., (215) 986-4080, e-mail: william.stroud@unisys.com.

See also A contingent of contingencies and DewarView to see 2000.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.