Standard newspaper was last evening hit by a technical hitch that led to production hiccups and delayed printing of today’s edition. As a result, the newspaper failed to print The Beat, the weekly business pullout published every Tuesday.
The main server collapsed towards press time, forcing a shift to the manual system which presented production challenges for the staff, mainly editor and designers. “It’s a miracle they produced the paper. The magazine could not be salvaged. That’s why our paper today is so small and some stories repeated for example on page 11 the Millie Odhiambo story is repeated on page 28,” said a Standard staff.
The server was bought from Germany against advice from some of the Groups’ IT experts who felt it was outdated and not robust enough to handle enormous operations of a newspaper. Trouble began at around 6pm yesterday when users could not connect to the system and files “just disappeared.”
Even internet was unavailable. “Guys stayed around till 10pm hoping it would be fixed but it never got up. So they had to use the old system of inDesign, which most people had forgotten how it works. Everything was done manually from placing stories and photos to outputting for print,” said the source.
We have reliably informed that the technical hitch has been rectified and the serve is up and running.
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