So I think everyone who has worked in L.A. newspapers read with interest the major crash that has pretty much shut down LANG production. A friend of mine was kind enough to forward a picture of Thursday’s paper to illustrate just what the Unisys system crash did to the design.

Basically, it wiped everything out. The newspaper image on the left, I cobbled from Newseum’s archive of California Firestorm coverage, which was just last October. You can see that the P-T usually has all sorts of graphics, boxes, those colorful skyboxes up top. The only graphical element besides the main photo is the ad, which is usually an image prepared beforehand. The crash (which I’m told is continuing into Friday) basically wiped out the template, making Thursday’s paper look like….a blank template like what I used to work with in Quark for my copy editing and design class in college. And surfing the LANG sites tonight, their right sidebars don’t seem to be loading up, either.

I gotta tell ya…I’m really glad to not be in newspapers anymore. But, oh, you don’t want to know how I get when there’s no Internet access…