The Chronicle that almost wasn’t

Man, what a difference a week makes.
Last week was one of the most difficult weeks in the recent history of the Custer County Chronicle. That’s because a week ago there almost wasn’t a Custer County Chronicle.
It was last Tuesday morning when we received a phone call we had not received in our history of printing the paper at the Rapid City Journal. Their press foreman, Mike, informed us that not only was their press down, but pretty much the entirety of the system run by the Journal’s parent company, Lee Enterprises, was down. What did that mean? They couldn’t receive pages, didn’t have internet, couldn’t print anything. They were pretty much dead in the water. They weren’t sure when things would be rectified, they told us, and weren’t sure they could print our paper Wednesday morning.
It was June of 2001 when the Journal first started printing our newspaper. At that time we had just moved to our current building, away from what the the time was known as the Darling Plaza. It is where Highmark sits now. The entire length of that building was home to the Chronicle.
Since that day, the Journal has faithfully printed our newspaper, with no weather, internet issues or other issues keeping that from happening. Until last Wednesday, that is.
Upon hearing that news, we sprang into action. The first order of business was to try to find a backup to print us, just in case. We told the Journal to keep us abreast of any changes in their predicament while we began to try to find a place to print our paper. Calls were made to the owners of newspaper presses in Martin, Spearfish and even Sheridan, Wyo.
Newspaper is something of a brotherhood, and each place we called offered to help us out in our time of need. The problem, we soon found out, is that our page size is somewhat unique, and our options were to print our page size on a template that wasn’t the same size or to completely reconfigure our page size for one week of printing. To do that on such short notice would have been next to impossible while also still trying to finish putting that week’s paper together. So, a decision was made to just get a paper out. Sure, it might look a little goofy, but goofy is better than nothing.
Eventually we settled on being printed at Spearfish, since it was closest. They were able to get us on their press at around 11 a.m. Wednesday, and the papers were printed by 1 p.m. Paul, our driver, got the papers to our office at around 3 p.m. that afternoon.
This, of course, meant we had two hours to get the papers stuffed, labeled and to the post office. We are short staffed, so that made things a little bit of a challenge, but we are proud to say we pushed the newspapers into the back door of the post office at 4:57 p.m. We can’t say the post office staff was happy we arrived with them at that time. Sorry about that, guys.
It was quite an adventure, and one we hope doesn’t happen again anytime soon. But read that Feb. 5 issue a little more closely for us—it almost didn’t happen.