Crash

Interesting day around the Northern Star. We had a major hardware crash Sunday, which took out our editorial system, the server where we store everything, our Web site and our office Internet access. Students wrote, edited and designed today's paper on laptops, in campus computer labs and on a few office computers where they could save to the desktop. With no network, everything had to be moved from one computer to another via flash drives.

A crash like this makes you realize how dependent we've become on technology for every part of the news business. A "little" thing like a server crash or a power failure can threaten to paralyze a newspaper. Yet, with a little creative thinking, we can turn to other technology that enables the paper to get out, with the final result being almost transparent to readers. Our Web site is still toast, but the paper went out on time.

All of which makes me wonder if print news will ever totally go away. When technology is unavailable, paper still wins. And the technology we rely on can be a lot more fragile than we like to think. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, print newspapers became an information lifeline for those communities. If a larger catastrophe ever were to take out electricity for a region, ink on paper would win the day (provided a print plant somewhere had power and delivery trucks).

I had a student reporter ask me this morning if she should go home because the Internet didn't work. As the Internet generation increasingly populates newsrooms, a little technology catastrophe now and then can be a good lesson. Newspapers were here hundreds of years before the Internet. Somehow, Ben Franklin and Joe Pulitzer and Woodward and Bernstein did OK, even without Google and Facebook.