Technology bug bites hard, leaving a lump of coal in reader stockings

The timing could not have been worse.
Last Tuesday morning a technology bug bit hard at the News-Register, with the end result visible for all our readers to see.
In case you were wondering, the poor quality printing on the A and B sections of last week’s edition was not a fluke, and no, you didn’t happen to get a bad copy that went out by mistake. They were all that way. Terrible. Hard to read. Unacceptable.
Such poor quality printing did not meet the standard you expect from your hometown newspaper, and I’m offering this sincere apology with assurance that it didn’t meet our standards either. Not even close.
For the record, the culprit in this episode, which in all honesty was one of the most stressful days in my 25 years as ANR co-publisher, was a faulty laser. The high-tech machine we use to burn the image of a newspaper page onto a metal plate shorted out at 6 a.m. on the busiest single printing day of the year. Our veteran production superintendent identified the problem quickly, but the solution involved a part that had to be shipped overnight to Aurora.
That meant we had to fire up our back-up imagesetter, which has been methodically maintained for this exact scenario. The problem was the plates used in that machine were not fresh and we found out the hard way, as you saw in print, that the quality coming off the press wasn’t good.
Postponing publication indefinitely was not something we could do to buy more time, however, because some of the material in the weekly edition is dated, including legal notices. As the county’s official paper of record, not printing a newspaper on time is simply not an option.
And so, we reluctantly sent out a product which we knew would disappoint our faithful readers, and it did. We offered a free link to our online e-edition for anyone and everyone who called in or asked what went wrong, and we also printed out 11x17 copies of specific pages on request. That wasn’t enough, in our view, so we have reprinted those two sections of last week’s paper and included them with this week’s edition.
The hardest part of this whole story is that this bad luck struck while we were putting out our annual holiday edition, which reads like a giant Christmas card to the community, from the community. Rest assured that the message of goodwill was as sincere as ever, and on behalf of our hard-working staff Paula and I humbly apologize for placing an unintended lump of coal in your stocking.
From all of us to all of you, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
KURT JOHNSON can be reached at kjohnson@ hamilton.net