Nuance changes but not key theme of storm coverage

These are the times for stories we'll always remember. They are the “where were you when” stories that we tell our children and grandchildren 20 or 30 years from now when a similar disaster invites comparison with the worst of all time.

In newspapers, they are times when we focus more than ever on service, and I am curious about how newspaper people will tell our story decades hence. How they will compare their emergency to this. The basics, I expect, will not be far different. Editors will still gather somewhere to ask each other what people will need to know. They'll still be producing tips for readers to use to remain safe at home or on the roads. They'll still be looking for stories of heroism and disaster. They'll be alerting reporters and photographers to start work early and developing communications systems so people can be deployed wherever the stories emerge.

Those were all activities our editors, writers, artists and photographers undertook this week. They set up systems to check with schools, municipalities and transportation centers. They identified staff members who could be called on for various tasks and set up hotel rooms so that those who live far away would be close to the action when the storm hit. They brainstormed ideas serious — like tips for staying safe — and fun — like the many names applied to this blizzard even before it had struck. They worried about press start — and worked with production and distribution staffs to move deadlines up by two hours in hopes we'd still be able to deliver papers in the morning.

As it would turn out, all that planning was an exercise in optimism. We would manage to get papers printed all right, but not delivered. Those efforts and stories would have to wait a day to be conjoined with the newspaper you receive today. But they would still have the strange vitality that accompanies a living history. And, perhaps more important, they would not fail to serve their purpose. Thanks to the Internet, they would all be available online, and they would be updated and modified throughout the storm.

This was not, by the way, an option during our last such storm. In 1999, the Internet, at least insofar as newspapers were concerned, was barely a factor. This time, we had the Internet as an outlet for publishing our stories — as well as an option for connecting even better to directly share the pictures and stories you have to tell.

But print delivery still required a level of commitment that few of us can know. You aren't likely to hear, for example, about the branch manager in Carol Stream who plowed out a distribution center whose doors were barricaded by snow. Or, about the branch manager in Grayslake who ended up stranded there even into Wednesday afternoon. Or, about the branch manager who went to her post before the first snowflake fell and whose husband and kids themselves left warm beds to meet her in the middle of the night and keep her company. Only to find, as Publisher Doug Ray explains on Page 1 today, the papers she was ready to distribute would not arrive. They couldn't. Trucks leaving the print center became stuck within a few miles, if the roads weren't closed to them altogether.

Tonight, we plan again. Editors and reporters have developed new stories — many of them also running on the Web. Deadlines again are moved up several hours. Branch workers brace to deal now with two days' worth of papers. Our goal still is service — information that tells the story of this time and helps you through it. It is pretty much the same goal we had in 1999. And, though it will no doubt have nuance I cannot imagine today, it is much the same goal we will have in 2021 — or ‘31 or whenever we see our next historic blizzard.