With barely six months to go before the dreaded Y2K, when date-challenged microchips are widely expected to experience a nervous breakdown, newspaper execs gathered Thursday at NEXPO to review a preparation checklist. Among the questions to ask, presented by moderator David Lightfoot of the Chesapeake Resource Group in Annapolis, Md.:

1. Do you have a detailed contingency plan? Have you tested it?
2. If fast recovery is the most important factor, what arrangements are in place to assure speedy attention to the issues?
3. Have managers decided on the functions that must continue at some level, those that must work indefinitely, and those that can be shut down?
4. Does your contingency plan cover these major considerations? Loss of AC electricity, loss of environmental controls, interruption of water supplies, security breaches, internal and external communication interruptions, system hang-ups or shutdowns, performance degradation, irrational data presented to users, file corruption or loss, supply-chain breakdown, and alternative printing and publishing arrangements.
5. Has your publisher organized a chain of command, assigned responsibilities, set emergency authority, established funding, created a communications tree and issued instructions for emergency preparedness, disaster recovery and business-operations resumption?
6. How will you deal with breakdowns in legacy systems with no identifiable vendor, documentation or source code?
7. Have you established new requirements for documenting failures in anticipation of legal action, either seeking remedies or protecting your paper?
8. When the problem is over, will you reward employees who stand by or work through emergencies?

And finally, what's on the menu for your in-the-plant New Year's Eve party?

ATTENDANCE: 10,500 (preliminary), including exhibitors and INFE attendees; last year's show in Orlando drew 12,100 with exhibitors and folks from Marketing, Connections and Co-Op Conferences.

SQUARE FOOTAGE: 216,000 square feet, up from 210,000 square feet in Orlando during 1998.

EXHIBITORS: 391, compared with last year's 383.

ARRANGEMENTS COMMITTEE CHAIRS: 1999, Martha A. Reichold, production director, The Huntsville (Ala.) Times; 2000, Robin Shank, director of print-quality services, Los Angeles Times.

NEXT YEAR: Saturday-Tuesday, June 17-20, 2000, Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco. Contact Dawn Rhine, director, NEXPO Exposition & Conference. E-mail, rhind@naa.org; phone, ( 703) 902-1844. For exhibit sales, contact John Woodstock. E-mail, woodj@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1847. Keep track of NEXPO 2000 all year at www.nexpo.com.

TechNews Volume 5, Number 4: July/August1999

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