How we delivered the news during the Great Blizzard of ’26

Our special coverage of the blizzard of ‘26 was printed today and is right now being distributed to newsstands across the Island, and there is a big stack available at Cronig’s Markets both in Vineyard Haven and in West Tisbury.

There is quite a story in how we worked with our heroic colleagues at TCI Press in Seekonk, Mass. to get the paper printed at a time when so many newspapers caught in the spiral of this fierce nor’easter have been failing to get their print editions out. The venerable Boston Globe, my alma mater, notably was not able to print on Monday when the blizzard brought snowfall that rivaled the infamous blizzard of ‘78, making this Tuesday the first time in The Globe’s 153-year history that it failed to get a print edition out for delivery.

We are proud that we are maintaining our loyal history of delivery and have managed to come through with a paper, but we want you to know that both trucking and U.S. Postal Service delays may mean that home delivery on the Island will have to wait until tomorrow. We apologize for that, but those were forces beyond our control. It should be in your mailbox tomorrow morning. Thanks for your patience, and thanks for your support.

So how did we get this done? Well, the reporting team was out there braving Monday’s blizzard and foraging for power and internet connections and working around the clock to keep you updated on this historic snowstorm through our online coverage. 

The idea is for the section to be a framable keepsake, and so the front page and back page are connected by a yardstick marked at 24 inches, the amount of snowfall we recorded on the Island Monday. It also features a great photograph of the Flying Horses buried in snow, shot by freelance photographer Doug Allen, who generously offered up his shots when a lot of our team couldn’t get out of their driveways. We did this truncated, single section to make it a bit easier on our printers and on our team which, like you, have been doing a lot of shoveling in addition to working. And many were doing their reporting while they had no power. Luckily, our newsroom on Beach Road had power Tuesday, so we were able to huddle here, as we always do, to put the paper together.

This is a process that we realized most of you do not know about, which involves an all-day, all-week newsgathering, editing and layout operation that ends on our deadline at exactly 3 pm every Wednesday. That’s when we have to ship electronic files, or PDFs, over to TCI Press, where they are scanned onto plates and then an experienced printing team runs the plates through the web of a four-color Rockwell printer. The press room is loud; enormous rolls of newsprint are moved around with forklifts to be fed into the humming weave of the printer.

The floors are sticky with ink. It is all straight out of another century, and, maybe because I have loved working in print newspapers for most of the last 40 years, I am fond of all that noise and the ink-stained floors. It smells like news.

In the TCI Press parking lot, they measured 38 inches of snow, which had to be plowed. That far surpasses the ‘78 “storm of the century,” as it became known. Our intrepid reporter and news editor Eunki Seonwoo drove from his home in Falmouth all the way to Seekonk, which is 67 miles from Woods Hole, to fill up his trunk with about 1,000 copies so that we could get them here on the Island. At TCI Press, there are still two more pallets stacked with approximately 3,500 copies of The Times, which will be brought to a trucking depot in Warwick, Rhode Island tonight, as is done every week. Only this week, due to the storm, which paralyzed trucking routes that run up and down the East Coast from New York to the tip of Cape Cod, it’s been delayed. Tomorrow morning, we are being assured, the trucks will roll and come over on the Steamship Authority at 6 am and go straight to the loading dock at Cronig’s in Vineyard Haven where it will arrive along with produce. As I have written before, I love the fact that our newspaper arrives on the Island in a produce truck as fresh and nutritious as the vegetables that are loaded in all around it!

God willing, you will see the paper tomorrow. But please remember, you can always read all of the coverage online. Thanks for your patience, and please join me in a tip of the hat to the whole editorial and production team at The Times for getting the paper to you. Thanks also to the TCI Press team and our hero, Peter Howard, who runs the operations there and always looks out for our press run. 

Thank you most of all to you, our readers, for your support. 

Charles M. Sennott, Publisher