Friday, May 04, 2012

Memo: In crash probe, NewsGate upgrade delayed

Anonymous@7:21 has just posted what appears to be a memo addressing yesterday's NewsGate publishing software outage:

All,

Today we are focused on figuring out what happened last night and ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

I know a lot of you saw the new functionality coming in the NewsGate upgrade and many of you were excited by new features.

As much as we would like to get those new features out to you in order to improve your NewsGate experience, we need to focus on the issue and find out what caused that event.

We are delaying the upgrade until further notice.

I’ll update you as we know more about the incident and as we look to reschedule the upgrade.

Thank you all for your hard work last night; it was a tough night and everyone performed exceptionally.

Thanks,
Stacey

_________________
Stacey Martin
Director, Enterprise NewsGate Practice

15 comments:

  1. "The Event."

    Wasn't that an NBC series that got cancelled and was never resolved?

    Also, who exactly was "excited about the new features"???

    What a disaster Newsgate is.

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  2. Who is Stacy Martin? Does she work for Gannett or Newsgate? Where does she work out of? Who reports to her? Who does she report to? Anyone?

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    1. Only know that she came from Indy and prolly works for Gannett.

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  3. Newsgate is a horrible, horrible system and I can't believe that it was decided that this was the system for the future.

    In saying that Stacey is just a messenger because of her involvement with the NG project. 9:23 - she is a Gannett employee who does a good job, unfortunately she was assigned the NG project and now has to send emails every hour with the bad news from the NG world.

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  4. She was hardly "assigned" the project. Stacey left her group VP position in Nashville to be the director of the NewsGate support team. Works out of DC, and reports up through John Palmasano (USAT IT VP). There's just over a dozen people who work on NewsGate support, and report to Stacey.

    Gannett was the first large site to go on NewsGate 3. Tribune and McClatchy both have large NewsGate 2 systems, but when everyone is converted Gannett will have the largest NewsGate system, with maybe 3500 users. Tribune has like 2000 on their system.

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  5. Is there any reason to think that NewsGate can handle 3500 users? I know I will regret asking this, but did anyone think to ask BEFORE buying this piece of $&@(?

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  6. Newsgate is just the cheap substitute for a Microsoft product that probably would work better but would cost more. It's just a horror story for a productivity standpoint.

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  7. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  8. No one went out and looked at this system and thought, Newsgate will help the workers get a newspaper out with its ease of use, and we'll look better, too.

    Our quality has gone down since we started in Newsgate; that's painfully apparent. But we laid off workers to go to the hub, and now we don't have to pay for Microsoft or Quark or any such pesky licenses. Look at all the money we saved!

    And the first night we don't print a newspaper because the system crashes. ... priceless.

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  9. "Excited about the new features." That word "excited" can mean many things, like, Hitler was excited to see the Red Army advance on Berlin.

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  10. Worst system ever. Whomever is responsible should be fired.

    Oh wait, this is Gannett. It's time for a promotion!

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  11. Worst system ever. Whomever is responsible should be fired.

    Oh wait, this is Gannett. It's time for a promotion!

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  12. This slow, rickety system is driving editorial decisions. Say goodbye to reporting the news and hello to trend stories and features that can be planned weeks in advance.

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  13. Newsgate is better than what we had before in New Jersey (Coyote). Editing and web posting can now be done from one program. The slowdowns and outages are a pain, but once that is addressed the system should be fine.

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  14. Did they ever find a cause for the crash? Is there now a smarter backup plan, or at least any backup plan?

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