The Publisher -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 12/1/1997
Last Visited: 1/1/2004
This was the warning issued by Frank Paiva of The Seattle Times.He was among the experts who sat on a panel discussing the issue at the America West Newspaper Operations and Technology Conference held here Oct. 22-24.
Paiva told the conference that the United States government will spend (US) $30 billion to fix its Year 2000 (also known as Y2K) problems.He gave an overview of the situation, including legal implications which will inevitably result."There will be cases of shareholders suing companies and vice-versa over the Year 2000 problems," he said.
Despite being the "world's most unpopular project," all systems must be fixed or at least checked for Y2K compliancy, Paiva explained.
The Seattle Times has estimated its own Y2K solution at costing (US) $20 million.
To complicate things, the difficulty with this project is that its completion date is immovable."This is a problem because only 37 per cent of large projects are done on time, statistics show," he said.
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"We really are in the panic stage, and it's getting too late now," added Frank Paiva.
For some departments at newspapers, the problems will hit well before the Jan. 1, 2000 deadline, he says."For example, many subscriptions and advertising contracts extend more than one year.Therefore, it will hit us before 2000."
Many vendors who provide Y2K solutions are already booked solid, so there is no time to waste in preparing your own office solution, Paiva said.
To what extent this is a hardware problem versus a software problem is not really known, according to this panel.
Olson and Paiva urged newspapers to use the Internet to check on the compliance of specific software programs they use to produce their papers.
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Those who choose to ignore this problem, Paiva said, are going to have major problems.