Pricey readers,
I’m delighted to let you understand that our vendor, Chicago Tribune Firm, has efficiently repaired its printing presses in Schaumburg. The Solar-Occasions has returned to printing at our normal plant for greater than every week with no points, which has been an enormous reduction following an unprecedented interval of disruption.
It began July 16, when the newspaper was printed and delivered a day late. That day marked the primary time anybody may bear in mind the Solar-Occasions lacking a paper in our 76-year historical past. (The Tribune, the Day by day Herald, The Wall Road Journal, The New York Occasions and different papers additionally print on the identical plant and had been additionally affected by the outage.) The disruption didn’t finish there.
Whereas our normal presses had been down, we had been capable of print the paper by counting on extra printing capability at different crops. We needed to scramble each day to forestall that from taking place once more, slotting in each time one other printing plant across the area had extra printing capability and will accommodate us.
However that meant we had all kinds of deadlines to go to press. In some instances we had only a couple hours to satisfy deadlines that had been a lot sooner than regular. We additionally had way more restrictions on the variety of pages that might be printed in shade and the overall variety of pages in every day’s paper – and no capability to do further editions with information updates from later within the night.
It wasn’t till July 24 that we received the information we’d been eagerly awaiting — that we had been again to our common deadlines and had been printing in Schaumburg.
The scenario highlighted the vulnerability of newspapers in Chicago. But it surely additionally showcased our resilience, with everybody within the newsroom discovering methods to get papers to readers whereas the printing presses had been being repaired.
I so respect our employees for understanding, rolling with the punches and doing all the things attainable to get the paper out each day. And I’m very grateful to our readers and advertisers for sticking with us throughout this difficult time. Thanks for studying!
Warmly,
Jennifer Kho
Govt editor
