The New York Times has a column on how the late-night bombshell of the Bin Laden takedown affected the Times’s newspaper production process, coming as it did after most newspapers had already sent their staff to bed and their papers to the presses. The story is interesting in itself, but the most relevant part to Telereading involves the need to “stop the presses” in order to replace the front page of the next day’s paper with the news.
Out of 26 national paper sites, most had already completed their print run—only 6 were able to print updated copies. 7,000 copies printed in Queens had to be destroyed, and 165,000 extra copies were printed. And the New York Times website, even with its much-vaunted paywall, was having trouble:
With the world now alert that something momentous was under way, user traffic to NYTimes.com was mounting and the servers that handle news articles were “gasping for air,” Mr. Roberts said. Ms. Cooper’s short story first was posted as an article but, with the servers under duress, it had to be shifted over to a different set of computers that serve up Times blogs. Now it appeared not as an article but as a post on the blog The Lede.
As far as I know, it’s pretty rare that a story this huge breaks this late in the evening, so I’m not sure whether needing to stop the presses is as common anymore. But it is certainly an area where the immediacy of the web can trump the once-a-day production of printed papers—assuming that the web sites can handle the traffic. I wonder what lessons the New York Times will take from this?
When I was shopping yesterday, I was stopped by a man selling The Denver Post subscriptions outside the story. The first thing he asked me was how often I read it. I told him I never read it and he asked why. I told him that I used to subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News but when it went under, I decided not to continue with the Post. I don’t like their broadsheet format and I get all my news online long before it’s in the paper.
If he didn’t know that by now, then The Denver Post is doomed as well.