Los Angeles Times Extra Section

The Los Angeles Times launched a new section this week titled LATExtra for late breaking news. The Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday edition is produced with the regular newspaper the night before publication.

On Wednesday the news section was produced at 6:00 p.m., with the sports and LATExtra sections produced after 11:30 p.m. with the latest news and sports updates.

Unfortunately for the press room everything did not go as anticipated, with many delays while attempting to print several sections of the newspaper while also preparing for the new late night editions.

The pressmen at the Los Angeles Times are a bright group of men and women, always seeking ways to streamline production, while attempting to appease management. So there will be a learning curve as different methods of producing the newspaper are tested to find solutions for the lack of time and personnel producing your favorite newspaper.

Moving the start times ahead by five hours to produce the the A Section opens the window of time for printing the following days newspaper, but it's at a very harried pace, which I hope eases with time. Management in the press room needs to take a step back and allow the press operators room to experiment, without the fear of repercussions for trying something new that may produce positive or negative results.

Here at the Olympic Press Room activity is extremely high with many different groups of men converting the presses to 44 inches. The men from Pressline are working seven days per week, 12 to 14 hours everyday, as many different componets are altered. The roller crew is also on hand swapping the rubber rollers out for narrower rollers, and there are hundreds of rollers to be changed. The iron workers are preparing units 6 and 7 for the addition of color couples, which will add eight addition full color pages to the newspaper, they are also working seven days per week.

The parking lot at Olympic is filled with cars, just as it was in better times.

Jeff Prescott said "If they just slapped "Metro" on the 'new' section, nobody outside of the Romenesko Tribe would know the difference."

We agree with Mr. Prescott.