Plates proved to be problematic

An item on the front page of Saturday’s edition of The Commercial Review indicated that this week’s column was going to reminisce about the Jay County Fair in years gone by.
But I figure it makes more sense to explain why the pink dishes shown on that same front page weren’t pink but green.
Everything was going smoothly Friday night as we put the finishing touches on the Saturday edition of the daily. Ray Cooney had been on vacation all week, so I was sitting in for him, working with sports editor Chris Schanz and new county reporter Nathan Rubbelke.
But just about midnight, as the last of the plates were queued up for the computer-to-plate unit, something went wrong. Something went very wrong.
Production manager Brian Dodd was feeding a plate into the unit when he got an error message. Actually, the message said, “Fatal Error.”
Not words you want to hear in the middle of the night with a paper ready to go to press.
He re-booted the machine, ran some tests, and tried again. And, again, “Fatal Error” popped up.
By now, I was looking over his shoulder, along with three or four other folks. And I doubt that helped Brian’s blood pressure.
I went back to the newsroom while he called tech support. As I eavesdropped, I heard Brian say, “You gotta be kiddin’ me.” But he didn’t say, “kiddin’.”
We were down, and it was time to work on Plan B.
The Winchester News-Gazette is our nearest neighbor with a press, and we’ve backed them up in a pinch a number of times over the past four or five years.
While Brian reached out to them, I contacted Kim Stant in circulation so she could notify motor route drivers that we were going to be something like two to three hours late getting the daily off the press. That wouldn’t have any impact on home delivery, but it would make a real difference for the drivers. Many of them like to run their routes as soon as possible, and there was no point in having them sit around in the parking lot for three hours.
By about 12:30 a.m., Brian and our new pressman Justin were on their way to Winchester. Chris had uploaded the electronic files of the pages to Dropbox, so that Lisa — our rescuer — could download them in Winchester and make plates.
Then it was a matter of pacing and waiting. I sent Chris home and kept an eye on the parking lot in case drivers hadn’t gotten the message. Mailroom staff Jody Staver, Florence Hassan, and Jane Horine did their best to keep busy. (I don’t think the floors of the pressroom and loading dock have ever been so well-swept.)
Finally, about 2 a.m., Brian and Justin were back with the plates.
All seemed right with the world, at least for a couple of minutes. Then Brian let out an expletive.
In all the rush, one of the plates had been made incorrectly. Without going into detail, let’s just say that the magenta plate was wrong. There was no way we could print full color at that point without going all the way back to Winchester and remaking that one plate. To do that would have added another hour to the delay, and that’s if everything else went okay.
At that point, I remembered something an old publisher used to say: The first thing you’ve got to do with a newspaper is get it out. Everything else is secondary.
I gave the go-ahead to skip the magenta plate. As a result, those pink plates came out as if the picture had been taken in an aquarium instead of The Glass Museum.
But we got it out.
Now, as I write this, we’re still waiting for an expensive technician to install an expensive part so that we can get back in action at 100 percent. In the interim, we’re doing our best to be flexible. That means relying upon the help of our friends in Winchester again and probably eliminating full color for a day or two.
But I can live with that, and I figure our readers can too.
By the way, if you want to see those pink plates, you can check them out on the newspaper’s website.