Dear readers,
I’m delighted to let you know that our vendor, Chicago Tribune Company, has successfully repaired its printing presses in Schaumburg. The Sun-Times has returned to printing at our usual plant for more than a week with no issues, which has been a huge relief following an unprecedented period of disruption.
It started July 16, when the newspaper was printed and delivered a day late. That day marked the first time anyone could remember the Sun-Times missing a paper in our 76-year history. (The Tribune, the Daily Herald, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other papers also print at the same plant and were also affected by the outage.) The disruption didn’t end there.
While our usual presses were down, we were able to print the paper by relying on excess printing capacity at other plants. We had to scramble every day to prevent that from happening again, slotting in whenever another printing plant around the region had excess printing capacity and could accommodate us.
But that meant we had a wide variety of deadlines to go to press. In some cases we had just a couple hours to meet deadlines that were much earlier than normal. We also had far more restrictions on the number of pages that could be printed in color and the total number of pages in each day’s paper – and no ability to do additional editions with news updates from later in the evening.
It wasn’t until July 24 that we got the news we’d been eagerly awaiting — that we were back to our regular deadlines and were printing in Schaumburg.
The situation highlighted the vulnerability of newspapers in Chicago. But it also showcased our resilience, with everyone in the newsroom finding ways to get papers to readers while the printing presses were being repaired.
I so appreciate our staff for understanding, rolling with the punches and doing everything possible to get the paper out every day. And I’m very grateful to our readers and advertisers for sticking with us during this challenging time. Thanks for reading!
Warmly,
Jennifer Kho
Executive editor