New Haven, CT — For the staff of the Yale Daily News, midnight is more than just “the witching hour.” Throughout the school year, it’s a mere hour before deadline. While their classmates slumber or study, the 24-member team scrambles to edit and proof stories, tweak page designs, and FTP the electronic files off to the publisher. If all goes well, the paper hits newsstands by early morning. Beginning in January of 2004, the publication shifted its technology infrastructure to Power Mac G5 computers, Mac OS X, and Xserves. Despite the fact that the News has no tech support staff, this powerful new system has yet to miss a beat.
The Yale Daily News is the oldest college daily in the country, and boasts a tradition of journalistic excellence. Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau honed his cartooning skills while on staff at the News; William F. Buckley and Joe Lieberman served as editors. Published independently of the university, the paper depends on alumni contributions and the tireless efforts of its staff to stay in print.
Ensuring the News is reader-ready each morning requires the reporters, editors, and photographers to toil through the night — the staff does the majority of its work from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Toss an extremely demanding academic schedule into the mix, and it’s clear that the student journalists need a technology infrastructure that’s dependable, robust, and helps them get the most out of those late-night hours. System downtime just isn’t an option, says photography editor Nathan Francis.
“It’s really important to us to have a system in place that basically manages itself, and will be self-supporting,” Francis says. “None of us wants to have a reliance on a tech support staff. We’d used Macs for a long time for our production needs … so when Mac OS X came out, offering even more stability and reliability, it just made sense to us to make the upgrade.”
Our Xserves have not been rebooted since the day they were installed … [Their] reliability is far and above what we could ever have with anything else out there.
— Nathan Francis, Photography Editor, Yale Daily News
Xserves Keep Production on Track
Migrating to Mac OS X not only meant that the News would make every deadline; the new operating system also would enable the staff to take advantage of powerful workflow and production tools. Flux Consulting, a systems integrator whose publishing clients include Maxim and Reader’s Digest, was tapped to assist the Yale Daily News in implementing the Adobe Creative Suite and Softcare K4 Publishing System.
The new products, which support and keep countless media-rich files flowing between content creators and reviewers, rely on the paper’s two dual 1.33 GHz Xserves. Each has 2 GB of RAM, ably managing the K4 software as well as graphic content and photo storage.
“Our Xserves have not been rebooted since the day they were installed,” marvels Francis. “I’m a Computer Science major when I’m not working on the paper, and I’ve worked with all sorts of PC solutions. The reliability we have with our Xserves is far and above what we could ever have with anything else out there.”
Online in a Week
Francis and Flux founding partner Scott Dunn did all of the setup and configuration of the new News systems. According to Francis, all tasks were accomplished in short order.
“Scott came in on a Monday afternoon, we opened up the boxes and moved the entire infrastructure later that week, produced the paper over the weekend, and were still on newsstands on Monday morning,” Francis reports. “Mac OS X Server’s setup and management tools were enormously helpful for us — especially ASR, which is a command-line utility we used to image all of the machines. Once we created a master image, cloning it out to all of the machines was really quick. The utilities in Xserve were very useful as well.”
Power to Spare
News staffers now use Power Mac G5 computers with 20-inch Apple Cinema Displays for production, design, and photographic work. Desk editors employ iMac computers, while reporters work on Power Mac G4 systems.
