THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412030008
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LYNN FEIGENBAUM
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Thanksgiving Day 1994 - newspaper-wise, it was not a day of thanks. ``Disaster'' is the way production folks here described it. Readers were even less charitable, calling us ``turkeys'' and ``Scrooges'' and other, unprintable epithets.
They had good reason. On Thursday, Nov. 24, when most people had the day off and looked forward to the hefty holiday edition, the paper arrived late at about 80,000 homes - in some cases, hours late; in others, not till the next day. A few never got their paper at all.
``What is the problem down there!?'' yelled one frustrated subscriber who, like hundreds of others, had dialed and redialed the newspapers' home-delivery number, only to get busy signals.
What was the problem? In a nutshell, said production director Warren Skipper, the size of the paper, the complexity of that day's print run and ``us being shortsighted in our planning.''
Herewith, some of the details, supplied by Skipper, circulation director Dee Carpenter and others.
The Thanksgiving newspaper, coming the day before the premier holiday shopping bonanza, is always the biggest of the year. This year it was bigger than ever because of the number of advertising inserts, many of them multi-page catalogs.
The first thing to go wrong was a late start on the inserts, causing production crews to fall behind on assembling them. Then, more inserts than usual were zoned for different cities and neighborhoods, slowing things down further.
The delays snowballed as overloaded equipment began to malfunction. Computers that coordinate delivering the papers to the trucks went down. Batteries gave out on machines moving the papers off the trucks and into distribution centers.
Human ``equipment'' got strained, too. Many carriers stuck it out for hours, then were bogged down by the king-sized papers they had to deliver.
Ironically, most subscribers - 100,000 - were unaware there even was a problem. I was one of them; the paper was on my doorstep bright and early Thursday morning. The 30,000 papers that go into vending machines and stores were hustled out early, to get them out of the way.
Hardest hit were Virginia Beach subscribers, who get newspapers at the end of the press run. Some 6,500 didn't get their papers until Friday.
What frustrated these readers as much as the delay was being unable to reach anyone at 446-9000, the newspaper's home-delivery number.
Usually, a holiday morning is pretty quiet so only 11 customer service representatives, half the regular contingent, were manning phones. As the problems mounted, eight more were called in. But that still meant that only 19 lines could be answered at one time. And thousands of calls were flooding in. One reader, using automatic redial, said he called every 5 minutes for 3 1/2 hours.
Eventually, callers gave up on the circulation number and called the public editor's office, security guards, reporters, the Beacon office, editorial writers - any other number they could find in the phone book or the newspaper.
A few callers were lucky and got people like Tammi Nothnagel, the editorial assistant who was manning the newsroom phone lines. Or police reporter Steve Stone, who spent most of that day fielding subscriber calls and writing the reader explanation that ran on the front page the next day. Stone even gave a newspaper to one unhappy man who drove to the Norfolk office from Virginia Beach.
There were heroic efforts all over the newspaper, hundreds of employees - circulation managers, carriers, pressroom workers, administration staffers and others - who gave up their Thanksgiving dinners or cut short vacations to stuff ads into paper, deliver late copies to unfamiliar neighborhoods and otherwise help with the backlog of newspapers.
But thousands of Beach readers knew only that their papers had not yet been delivered. ``This is very annoying and very cheesy and very small-town,'' said a message in my overflowing voice-mailbox from Ron Ireland. He never did get his paper.
``There's not a single one of us who doesn't feel we let our readers down,'' said Skipper, ``but the people involved suffered the most.''
He and other managers are now working on ways to prevent this from happening again and to improve communication if there is a home-delivery delay.
Explanations are fine but, as one reader put it, ``I don't pay you for excuses. I want my newspaper as you promised.''
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net.
by CNB