Charles Apple

Two more big happenings over the weekend you need to know about…

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CHICAGO TRIBUNE CHANGES ITS NAMEPLATE

This morning, the Chicago Tribune downsized to the 48-inch web and tweaked parts of its design, including its weather page.

One not-so-minor tweak was the big blue bar across the top of A1, which has been there since the early 1980s and was redesigned itself in 2001.

Before:

After:

Naturally, you’ll want to head over to The Newseum to get a look at what this change does to the Trib’s A1. However, today’s Tribune page at The Newseum suffers from some kind of PDF glitch; all the photos reverted to black-and-white. So make a note to look for it Tuesday.

Read all about it — including a nice Q&A with Tribune AME Joe Knowles and a PDF file of previous Tribune nameplates over the years — over at the SND Update blog.

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JUST AS WE SUSPECTED, CCI REALLY DOES SUCK

This won’t come as a surprise to San Jose’s Martin Gee — The CCI buttons he gave out in Orlando were a scream — But CCI went down in a major way Saturday night at The Indianapolis Star, taking much of the Sunday paper with it.

Editor & Publisher, in fact, is calling it “a massive failure.” E&P’s Joe Strupp reports:

The glitch resulted in numerous pages worth of news and advertising planned for the Sunday paper being left out and replaced by other content, said Managing Editor Pam Fine. She said the problem occurred after the paper’s CCI Publishing System went down and content placed in it was not accessible.

“We wound up running a lot of wire we would ordinarily not run,” Fine told E&P, citing as an example a Page One wire story on the Blackwater security firm and a Web story about a local congressional caucus that ran inside. “We also had a place holder for an enterprise piece that will now run on Tuesday.”

Several stories from the Saturday edition were reprinted in the Sunday paper and a number of stories meant for the Sunday edition were not published until today. The Saturday Faith and Values page, for instance, was published again on Sunday, Fine said.

I’d love to report that this is a CCI-only thing. But those of you who have been around a while know what I mean: Any front-end system can bring a paper to its knees. Been there and done that.

That being said, we have this note for Martin Gee: Please rush a pile of those buttons to Indy. They could probably use them right about now.

Meanwhile, our condolences to our friends at The Star.

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UPDATE

Indianapolis Star AME Scott Goldman writes:

Just for the record, this was NOT a CCI problem. We had a hard disk system failure, and the backup would not respond, either. We lost CCI, we lost Lotus Notes, two web sites, our photo system … it was a LOT of fun.

Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp reported Tuesday:

The Indianapolis Star’s weekend computer problems… were not caused by the paper’s CCI Publishing System failing, as Star editors previously told E&P.

Officials at The Star clarified the problem today, stating that it was a failure in the paper’s SAN disk storage system, which prevented the CCI and other systems from accessing stored data.

Goldman, again:

…My favorite line of the night? “Does anyone remember how to do anything in Quark?”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Industry woes, News design, Newspapers, Redesigns, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.