With Sparks of Ingenuity, Democrat-Gazette Emerges From Dark

A Google Street View image of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette building in Little Rock (© Google)

Where was the staff of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette when the lights went out? Like much of the core of downtown Little Rock on Tuesday night, in the dark.

But with deadlines looming, Democrat-Gazette employees were also in a pickle.

Initiative and ingenuity were on their side, though, and most subscribers, including Arkansas Business, received their copies on time Wednesday morning. The outcome was a result of what Democrat-Gazette information services director Clay Carson called his proudest moment in 38 years at the Little Rock newspaper.

“May sound sappy, but true,” Carson told Arkansas Business, crediting a “lot of creative problem-solving” and the fact that his colleagues “kept a very positive attitude.”

Managing Editor David Bailey praised “lots of heroes” and said the paper was still patching software back together at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

The power went out about 8:40 p.m. at the Democrat-Gazette’s headquarters at Capitol Avenue and Scott Street, part of a darkened grid from Cumberland Street to Broadway east to west, and the Arkansas River to Ninth Street north and south. Entergy Arkansas said that the cause was an equipment failure at a substation on Gaines Street. The lights came back on about 3 a.m., long after the paper had to be put to bed.

Carson brought in his crew of five but with all their equipment dead, he had no real plan. 

“First we got some laptops and cellular hot spots so copy could be processed,” Carson said, noting that a great deal of the paper’s production had taken place before the outage. “ETA on the power was 11:30, so I thought we might just ride it out” with editors processing stories with laptops and flashlights, with the idea of designing late-edition pages electronically after the juice returned.

But when the darkness lingered, he changed his mind and sent three page-design computers and newsroom employees to the paper’s printing plant east of I-30 near the Clinton Presidential Library.

Since the printing plant also produces the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, creative ways had to be found to digitally transfer images of its pages to the printing press computers. 

“We decided to go on and print what we had even though it meant some low-resolution ads,” Carson said, referring to how some advertisements would appear in print. “We had no access to the ad production system, which is something to plan for the future.”

Carson’s crew completed work on the paper at 2 a.m., late but timely enough to get papers onto delivery trucks, and the power came back on about an hour later. But the long night was far from over for the technical crew. 

“We started the four-hour process to bring up all of our systems, had a few hiccups, and are still ironing out,” Carson wrote as noon approached Wednesday morning. He sent his employees home to sleep, and stayed on, “running on Diet Coke.”

But he still had his sense of humor. “Retirement looks good,” he said.

The paper’s website, ArkansasOnline.com, experienced intermittent problems through early afternoon. 

Carson listed Toby Simmons, Chris Ritter, Jim Armstrong and T.K. Spencer as the heroes of his crew, but added that “countless others from the newsroom and pressroom” went above and beyond. Bailey credited Carson himself as a “head hero,” along with news veterans Stacy Hawkins, Terry Austin and Barry Arthur. Nick Elliott was production’s indispensable man, Bailey said.

“Stacy and Terry are finally getting to sleep off the adventure,” Bailey said at midmorning. “Clay is still here. He just called me full of praise for the whole news department. We had to invent a lot of new processes last night.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Entergy said on Twitter that squirrels nesting in underground electrical equipment had caused all the trouble.