Changes to this weekend's Sun-Times newspapers as printing plant disruption continues: an editor's note

Dear readers,

We have been unable to print the newspaper as usual this week due to unexpected issues with the printing presses at our vendor, Chicago Tribune Company, which also prints the Tribune, the Daily Herald, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other papers.

We’re deeply disappointed that this disruption has continued into the weekend. Since Tuesday, we’ve had to print at multiple facilities across the region, each with different limitations affecting the number of pages it can print, which pages can be in color vs. black and white, our deadlines and more.

As a result of an earlier-than-usual press time, we were unable to include news from Friday evening in Saturday’s paper. That means that no stories from the first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival got in. You also will not find the usual TV listings in the papers this weekend, due to the global tech outage.

I’m sorry to say that, this week, there will be no “3-star” or bulldog Sunday edition, which is what we call our early edition of the Sunday paper that usually is available on Saturday. In addition, our regular Sunday edition will be smaller than usual.

If you usually buy the bulldog edition, I hope you will consider getting the Saturday paper and the regular Sunday paper instead.

The digital version of the Sun-Times, our e-paper, will be available for free all weekend at suntimes.com. We plan to keep the paywall down so that it’s freely available to everyone on Sunday.

All of these changes this weekend are a result of serious issues with the presses that started Monday night. Tuesday’s papers and some of Wednesday’s papers were delivered late or not at all. The newspapers have been limited to fewer pages than usual because of the print capacity available. We had to move our Taste section from its usual Wednesday spot to Thursday. And we could not include news from Wednesday evening, including key speeches at the Republican National Convention and evening sporting events, in Thursday’s paper but had to hold those stories for Friday’s paper instead.

We’re sorry for any issues this disruption has caused you. We don’t know when we’ll be able to start printing at our usual location again, but I plan to keep you updated with these editor’s notes. We’re grateful for your understanding and patience as we work hard to find ways to get you the newspaper.

Thanks for reading and supporting the Sun-Times!

Warmly,

Jennifer Kho

Executive editor