I am really, really hoping that print subscribers are reading this over breakfast on Sunday morning.
It’s been a tough week. We’ve had our fair share of production problems in the past few days, which have caused late deliveries at best, and no deliveries at worst.
We sincerely apologize for these problems. We understand that patience is wearing thin. Rest assured that we are doing all that we can to work out the bugs in the system.
We appreciate your support, and we don’t like it when we fail.
The problems started with the storm on Tuesday evening. There weren’t many power outages in the core municipalities, but away from Victoria, Oak Bay, Esquimalt and the southern part of Saanich, it was a different story.
At one point, the B.C. Hydro outages map showed that power was out at almost every address from Chemainus to Qualicum Beach. Unfortunately, that included Ladysmith, where the Times Colonist is printed.
The press plant lost power at about 7:15 p.m. We knew that when the power came back on, it would take at least three hours to get that press online. We waited longer than we should have, and at 10:30 p.m. we cancelled the Wednesday print edition.
In the end, that decision did not matter, because the power was not restored until almost 8 p.m. Wednesday. We had planned a three-section edition for Thursday, but the newspaper is printed two sections at a time, and we did not have time to print that third section.
That meant we had to drop some features — and no matter which ones we drop, we will have unhappy readers. Among other things, we decided to drop the puzzle page, because we could make up for it by running extra puzzle pages later.
Just for the record: There are a lot of keeners who hate missing their puzzles. I think I heard from most of you.
We thought we would be back on track with the Friday edition, but we were wrong. Another breakdown, this time in communication, resulted in another late paper. Saturday’s edition was also a bit late, which did not help.
We’ve had power outages before, but I’ve never seen the impact last this long.
A couple of people who reached out told me that our big mistake was shifting the printing to a plant in Ladysmith. The newspaper would not have been late, they said, if we still had the press in our old location on Douglas Street.
Well, honestly, it would not have been late because it would not have existed. The money we saved by outsourcing printing meant that we were able to keep going when our advertising revenue collapsed at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
Again, we apologize to our readers. You deserve better service than you have been getting.
We also need to apologize to our drivers and carriers, who are ready to go in the wee hours, day after day. This week, they waited for hours, then faced the wrath of subscribers as they made their deliveries.
(Please don’t berate the carriers. It’s not their fault. Let them finish their routes as quickly as they can.)
Thanks again for your support. Thanks again for hanging in. And I sincerely hope that this newspaper arrived on time.
Dave Obee is editor and publisher of the Times Colonist.
