Diesel-Powered Papers
by Karen Bowman
With power shortages and rolling blackouts almost as common as surfboards in California these days, the summer poses the threat of frequent power crunches that could hinder newspaper operations across the country.
The energy crisis isn’t just a California problem. Stan Richmond, vice president of operations for Cox Newspapers Inc. in Atlanta, says availability of quality power is his biggest concern right now. At least two Cox facilities house permanent generators, and the others have provisions for generator connections.
“In some areas, you may not have a blackout, but what you are getting is so poor in quality it will damage the equipment,” he says. “Therefore, many newspapers need supplemental power–even when power is there.”
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| IT department members at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., pose for a group picture following a successful live test of the paper’s generator. |
The California crisis prompted at least two newspapers in the state–The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa and the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek–to purchase generators that kick in with diesel-fueled power during blackouts. When the electricity goes out, the generator maintains business as usual, from advertising and sales to the newsroom, pre-press and online services, says Nick Smith, information technology manager for the Press Democrat, whose generator was installed in January.
The purchase of the Times’ generator marks the end of a 15-year campaign to obtain funding for the project, says Ron Severn, facilities manager. “Unfortunately, it’s not a cheap piece of equipment,” he says. “If you spend $1 million to purchase and install a generator, and you only use it once or twice a year, what’s it worth to you? All we would have to do is miss a couple of issues, and it would pay for itself.”
The generator has been shipped to the facility, Severn adds, but the Times can’t use it until all city permits have been approved. He anticipates it being fully operational by the end of April.
Supply and demand aren’t the only reasons for blackouts. Severe weather can make some regions more susceptible to outages. Located near the Nevada desert, the Reno Gazette-Journal experiences frequent lightning storms, and its 21-year-old generator has saved the day countless times. In 1999 alone, the 5,000-gallon-capacity generator fired on about 30 times, recalls Kevin Johnson, the Journal’s production manager. “That’s about two hits a month–it could severely handicap your operation,” he says.
Planning the purchase of a backup power source can take months, says Smith. To determine the correct-size generator needed at the Press Democrat, he explains, a project team surveyed all equipment and systems necessary to produce the paper and calculated the electrical load.
A generator should work in tandem with the building’s uninterrupted-power-source system, adds Johnson. When the electricity goes out, the generator turns on in a split second.
The machinery requires little maintenance if it’s serviced at regular intervals, says Johnson. Because generators can run anywhere from eight to 16 hours, the likelihood of running out of fuel is slim. Even so, Smith says the Press Democrat has contracted with a local fuel company to keep the tank filled in case of catastrophe.
Although newspapers often are willing to help out their neighbors, don’t rely on others for emergency power because reciprocal agreements aren’t always practical. The newspaper located closest to the Press Democrat, for example, doesn’t own a generator. While Smith, Severn and Johnson’s newspapers have reciprocal agreements with their neighbors for emergencies or mechanical press problems, “it takes a lot of time to put those operations into practice,” Severn points out. “It’s not just a matter of pulling a switch.”
As long as the demand for electrical power surpasses the available supply,
Richmond encourages newspapers everywhere to become as self-sufficient
as possible. “I would caution people to really look at their electrical
supply,” he says. “They should not be lulled to sleep that this
is just a West Coast problem. As the summer comes and the need for power
increases, this problem could creep east.” 
Bowman is a Bridgewater, Va., free-lance writer. E-mail, kbowman@bridgewater.edu.
Tribune’s Tracking Tools
by W. Eric Schult
The need to monitor critical systems isn’t unique to newspapers. So when the Chicago Tribune went shopping for tools to track pagination-system performance and alert administrators to problems, it didn’t turn to an industry-specific software vendor.
The Tribune recently purchased, and is in the process of deploying, a performance-management and capacity-planning solution produced by TeamQuest Corp. of Clear Lake, Iowa.
The Tribune may be the first major newspaper TeamQuest has done business with, acknowledges Renee Ritter, account coordinator. But “it doesn’t really matter that it’s a newspaper,” she maintains. “Everybody has performance and capacity-handling issues.”
What TeamQuest does for such diverse customers as Vanguard, Disney, Anderson Windows, MCIWorldCom and Mercedes Benz can be applied to the Tribune and other newspapers, she says.
The first wave of implementation at the Tribune will focus on pagination systems, says Chris Maus, senior systems analyst. Eventually, “we’ll also be managing the output systems” and “periphery systems’’ such as the AP Wire, he says. “We want to make sure that stuff is constantly coming in.”
“The applications that we run have some built-in monitoring,” Maus adds, but TeamQuest’s software goes a step further by paging the system administrator when problems arise.
Administrators can specify the kind of conditions that will produce an alert, avoiding false alarms. “I don’t want to get paged every time [a system] hiccups,” Maus says.
The TeamQuest Alert software also can produce e-mails that communicate systems’ status to administrators, or automatically launch reactive scripts when a threshold has been met or exceeded, Ritter says. IT managers can choose how they want the software to respond to any given set of conditions, she says.
The Tribune purchased the software as part of a package that includes TeamQuest View and TeamQuest on the Web, which reports performance data using a browser interface.
Maus installed demos on “several different test systems” before buying. “It’s a really simple installation,” he says, and the applications don’t unnecessarily impede server performance. “It’s critical that the monitoring software be as unobtrusive as possible and use a minimum of system resources,” he says.
Another factor in selecting TeamQuest was the software’s ability to monitor servers running a variety of operating systems. “Most of our stuff is on Unix boxes, running various versions of Solaris, 2.6 or above,” Maus says, but the Tribune’s raster-image processors run on Alpha NT and are slated to be migrated over to an Intel platform in the near future.
One of TeamQuest’s strengths, Ritter says, “is our ability
to collect statistics across a heterogeneous environment.” The company’s
monitoring package “runs on every flavor of Unix” and on Windows
NT 2000, she says.
Schult is production-systems manager for the Journal Times in Racine, Wis. E-mail, wes@wi.net.