What a week

The week in Hell (OK, the three days, really) is over. I guess it wasn't that bad. Or at least I keep telling myself that.

This was the week where we switched to a new computer system in the newsroom. New hardware, new software, same old people. Yikes. We trained about an hour a day for about five days, after we went to press. That part went well. Then Wednesday, we went "live" with the new system for that day's paper. We were an hour and a half late going to press, which the software company's IT guys said was actually pretty good. Most papers are two or three hours late. And they were happy because we're an afternoon paper, so they didn't have to stay up until 3 a.m. for us.

There were other problems. Somehow one of the front-page stories lost its first half, so we had to reprint it the next day, and it took awhile to figure out how to recover the original story. Our managing editor, who set up the few templates and libraries we have to work with, forgot about setting them up for the stocks page, which is also the page for our obits and jumps from page 1. So we had to part of the page on InDesign, and part of it on Quark, and pre-press double-burned the plate. That's what we're still doing. The sports guys had a lot of trouble with their scoreboard page, too, with all the agate type.

Add to that the fact the reporters are dealing with training and new software, too, so our local story count is down, and just filling the paper has been a challenge. I think we're awful lucky nothing big has happened locally.

I had to go in today and do the Sunday lifestyle pages that I normally get done on Friday afternoon. What would normally take me a couple hourse took five!

Really, though, it does seem like we're doing well. Our sister papers in the company are also switching systems. We've heard that one of them -- sort of our rival, since we cover similar territory in circulation and news -- is having to take it much slower than we have. They have five people on the news copy desk and got five weeks worth of training. They are doing only one of two pages a day on the new system. Compare that to our paper, where, we have three people on the news desk putting out about 10 pages a day, and I think we're kicking some ass!

Next week, the other paginator will be back after taking a couple weeks when his wife had a baby, but he hasn't had any training on the new system. So it will still be rough for awhile. I've put in about 18 hours overtime this week. I'm going to need a break soon.