Osama Story Literally Stopped the Presses at NYTimes

When late on Sunday night The New York Times tore up one front page and crashed an entirely new one about Osama Bin Laden’s death, it was only the third time in the last 43 years the paper literally stopped the presses, according to a posting by John Koblin at wwd.com.

The Times printed 350,000 copies of a non-Bin Laden paper — which included a story with the headline, “Another Side of Tilapia, the Ideal Farm Fish” — before it dumped that edition and got the news of President Barack Obama’s late night announcement in a new edition, according to an internal memo. Seventy percent of the newspapers the Times wound up printing for Monday had the bin Laden news. The Times printed an additional 165,000 copies of the paper on Monday, as well.

To the best of anyone’s institutional memory, the only other instances when the Times is believed to have stopped the presses in the last few decades: Lyndon Johnson’s abrupt announcement that he would not run for reelection in 1968, and the night of the 2000 cliffhanger election.

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