One Kentucky Paper's Tale of Whoa!
Maybe newspapers should just take a hint.
Consider this tale of "Whoa!" from Louisville, Ky., over the weekend ...
Kentucky Derby on Saturday is the biggest day of the year in Louisville. There is no close second.
All eyes are on the southern city and the venerable horse race it hosts each year. And even if newspapers are struggling mightily to hold onto readers these days, Kentucky Derby Sunday is the biggest day of the year for the city's hometown newspaper, the Courier-Journal.
Again, there is no close second.
The Kentucky Derby is the Courier-Journal's story, and like any newspaper worth its salt, the prideful staff at the paper take the challenge to provide their readers with the most comprehensive coverage of the horse race and all the big doings at Churchill Downs anywhere. They do their job knowing that all eyes in their coverage area will be on their hard work.
So Saturday night as the newspaper, replete with a special 20-page section stuffed with nothing but Derby coverage, was going to print, the presses suddenly stopped. Not because anybody ordered them to be stopped, but because of an electrical problem.
Panic undoubtedly ensued as the pressmen worked feverishly to right the problem. One hour turned into two, and two and into three and still, no papers were being printed. Delivery trucks stood idle. Daybreak would be coming soon.
It suddenly became painfully clear the problem wouldn't be resolved in time to get its nearly quarter-million Sunday copies of the newspaper on the street in time for their readers to enjoy.
This was the nightmare scenario for any newspaper, which have traditionally prided themselves in making sure a newspaper goes out every single day -- rain, sleet, snow and press failures be damned.
This was Armageddon for the Courier-Journal, though, given the unbelievable timing of this press outage.
The paper's pre-printed Sunday sections (comics, travel, etc.) would still be delivered, but all the live-news coverage, including (and mostly) that 20-page special Kentucky Derby section, would not be delivered until Monday, when hopefully the press problems would be resolved.
So sometime after the sun rose high in the Kentucky sky Sunday, Arnold Garson, the president and publisher of the Courier-Journal took to the Internet to face the music, and explain to readers why all but 43,000 of them across the state didn't get the Derby news delivered to their doorstep that morning.
It's not known if what preceded Garson's five-or-so minute explanation was planned, but when one went to the paper's website and clicked on Garson's video explainer, up came an advertisement. And what was the ad pitching?
Constipation relief.
And so it goes for newspapers these days ...
(Got a tip, a gripe, or some kudos? Send 'em along.)