What is an online newspaper entertainment production staff to do when the country goes to war and the features print staff pulls entertainment stories in favor of "safer" lifestyle content?

This was the situation our three-person staff faced a few weeks ago, as war in Iraq became imminent yet without a certain go-day. While our print counterparts could simply switch gears to avoid looking frivolous should war break out after the Living section had gone to press, the decision left us with very little content for our dedicated online Entertainment page -- and as we already have a separate online Living page, we didn't have the luxury of deciding to simply switch our focus to lifestyle content.

We made the decision not to shy away from providing entertainment content, even as the war began. We instead decided to focus on it -- on how the war would be affecting local and national entertainment.

We scoured the wires -- God bless the wires -- for content, and by the end of the week we even managed to get enough notes from our writers to include our own local coverage (someday we hope to be in a place where that kind of turnaround can be there from day one or two, but for now we'll consider it a success :)

And we figured that by directing so much attention to the "Impact on Entertainment" series of centerpieces and thus giving the war its due serious attention (well, maybe with just a hint of our typical good-natured irreverence), our readers would forgive us the frivolousness that sometimes comes along with the headlines in our "today's faces" section.

Did we make the right decision? We think so. The package was very successful (in terms of page views at least), and we didn't receive a single complaint about the coverage -- which, as anyone at any mass media organization can tell you, is quite a feat in itself.

The package:
Day 1 -- Articles
Day 2 -- Articles
Day 3 -- Articles
Day 4 -- Articles
Day 5 -- Articles

On a related note, we had a contingency plan set in place to pull the "today's faces" box if a tragedy of proper scale called for it. This required a little creative adaptation of our normal workflow because of the way our sites are currently set up, with entertainment content resting on a temporary CMS which no one on the overnight staff has had time to learn. We employed a very simple low-tech fix, populating the Entertainment page index with only an include which rested on the regular server, allowing anyone on the online staff access to the file.

April 6, 2003