Editor’s notice: Thanks in your endurance throughout our printing plant challenges

Pricey readers,

I’m delighted to let you understand that our vendor, Chicago Tribune Firm, has efficiently repaired its printing presses in Schaumburg. The Solar-Occasions has returned to printing at our common plant for greater than every week with no points, which has been an enormous reduction following an unprecedented interval of disruption.

It began July 16, when the newspaper was printed and delivered a day late. That day marked the primary time anybody may keep in mind the Solar-Occasions lacking a paper in our 76-year historical past. (The Tribune, the Each day Herald, The Wall Road Journal, The New York Occasions and different papers additionally print on the similar plant and have been additionally affected by the outage.) The disruption didn’t finish there.

Whereas our common presses have been down, we have been in a position to print the paper by counting on extra printing capability at different crops. We needed to scramble each day to forestall that from taking place once more, slotting in every time one other printing plant across the area had extra printing capability and will accommodate us.

However that meant we had all kinds of deadlines to go to press. In some circumstances we had only a couple hours to fulfill deadlines that have been a lot sooner than regular. We additionally had way more restrictions on the variety of pages that could possibly be printed in colour and the whole variety of pages in every day’s paper – and no potential to do extra editions with information updates from later within the night.

It wasn’t till July 24 that we bought the information we’d been eagerly awaiting — that we have been again to our common deadlines and have been printing in Schaumburg.

The scenario highlighted the vulnerability of newspapers in Chicago. Nevertheless it additionally showcased our resilience, with everybody within the newsroom discovering methods to get papers to readers whereas the printing presses have been being repaired.

I so respect our employees for understanding, rolling with the punches and doing every part potential to get the paper out each day. And I’m very grateful to our readers and advertisers for sticking with us throughout this difficult time. Thanks for studying!

Warmly,

Jennifer Kho

Government editor