How we produced newspapers after a cyberattack took out all our servers

I work second shift, so I sleep from about 3:30 to 11:30 a.m.

On July 21, my boss called me at 11 a.m. or so: A cyberattack had taken down all the company's servers, and I was selected for a team to determine how to get the paper out. We were to meet in an hour - via Zoom, of course.

OK. I guess I'll get up.

The team included sharp people in charge of various parts of the company: advertising, editorial, classifieds, niche publications, press production, our Town Square commercial publication team. The priority became the next day's Daily Herald.

We use Adobe InDesign to create our pages. But that requires licenses on a server that we all access remotely. Now that server was down. So, first question: Do we have any spare copies of InDesign on actual office or personal computers?

The Town Square team came through with nine. A few people had personal copies. A good start.

Now can we re-create a standard Daily Herald page - the correct size, the correct custom typefaces, the correct settings to facilitate production? We need our page templates. Do we have any saved on any hard drive anywhere? It turned out a few of us, over a few departments, saved backups. We're in business.

Now, all of the 15 or so people producing pages need copies of all the fonts, normally all accessible from the company server. Who has copies of those? Yes, a couple of people had saved backups of those, too. We learned not every computer handles fonts quite the same way, so not every font appeared properly on all our pages - you may have noticed. But really the worst part was having to set a lot of the type "by hand" - having to change it for headlines and even the page numbers, when usually it's automated.

Next, pictures. Photographers usually place them all in our computer system. Without that system, photos had to somehow get to all the people in their home offices. We decided to use email and Google Drive.

We had writers and editors email their stories around, too. Ultimately they were sent to everyone who might put them on pages - plus publish them on our website. Which, by the way, also was harder.

Our web editors posted each article by completing a complicated form "on the back end."

And, hey, how about the advertisements? Our ad department has its own system for automatically placing ads on our pages. That was down, too. So like pictures, ads had to be placed in Google Drive for us to grab.

All in all, we basically had to learn how to ride a bike again. We improved some settings and got better with practice, and we got some advice from artists in other departments, but we never gained full efficiency and the full Daily Herald look.

Thanks to an IT team that worked basically 24/7 for a week, including over a weekend, to revive our servers, the Daily Herald is back to normal.

This was our Apollo 13 moment - the successful failure. Several determined people made it happen. It was amazing to be a part of it.