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The first news that Sen. Ted Kennedy was dying came to Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Rowland about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night. Susan Milligan, who was on Martha's Vineyard covering President Barack Obama for the Globe, called and told Rowland that Kennedy "might not make it through the evening," Rowland recalled.

By 2:15 a.m. Wednesday, the Globe's home page, Boston.com, had shifted to an all-Kennedy package, which grew over the next couple of hours to include stories, photos, videos and a guest book for people to share their memories of the senator.

The story of how the Globe pulled all that together in several hours, before most people had even heard the news, is really a story of what the staff did in the two months before: reporting and writing stories off deadline, producing video retrospectives, preparing a special home page layout.

When Milligan called at 11:30, the copy desk pulled up the shorter of two obituaries that were ready. The long obit had been written years before and updated in recent weeks. If Kennedy had died on the newspaper publishing cycle, Rowland said, the plan was to run the more extensive biography of the senator. Tuesday night, with the copy desk winding down and the presses already running, was a time for the abbreviated version.

Milligan called Rowland again at 1 a.m. to tell him Kennedy had died. (Rowland wouldn't characterize how close her source was to the Kennedys.) About the same time, Peter Canellos, the paper's editorial page editor and the former Washington bureau chief, called the copy desk to tell them the same news.

Twenty minutes later, Kennedy's press office put out a statement confirming his death, Rowland said. About 10 minutes after that, about 1:30 a.m., the Globe's Web staff posted a breaking news update, followed within about 15 minutes by the abbreviated obituary that would run in Wednesday's paper, according to Bennie DiNardo, deputy managing editor for multimedia. (The obituary was first published on the site's breaking news blog, MetroDesk, because that was the fastest way to get it online.)

Once Kennedy's office confirmed the news, Rowland said, Milligan and Matt Viser, who also was traveling with the president, started calling sources for reaction. They had until about 2:10 or 2:15 a.m. to add to the obit.

Wednesday's editions were already being printed. Editor Marty Baron told Editor & Publisher that he made the call to stop the presses to change the front and several inside pages. (That decision meant that readers on the Cape and the Vineyard received papers with news of Kennedy's death, Rowland said.)

Meanwhile, five Web employees joined the four that typically work through the night. A home page layout, built around a centerpiece carousel with three tabs, featuring photos, videos and comments from a Legacy.com guest book, had been prepared. Jason Tuohey, the daytime lead news producer, took the lead on finishing the home page early Wednesday morning, DiNardo said.

"I was impressed with the speed that we were able to do all this," DiNardo said. "Jason's just really good under deadline, getting things up quickly."

Rowland said he had made preparing for Kennedy's death a top priority when he took over as Washington bureau chief in July. For about two months, reporters had been working on stories that could be reported and written in advance -- focusing on obvious angles such as Kennedy's legislative legacy, his legacy in Massachusetts and his relationships with presidents over the years.

Rowland said he gave employees consecutive days to work on the stories to make sure they could delve into them. Those stories had been copyedited and fact-checked.

Many suspected in recent weeks that Kennedy wouldn't live long -- especially after he didn't attend his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver's funeral earlier this month -- and the Kennedys are familiar with media attention. But that didn't make the reporting any less sensitive. "We didn't want to seem sort of ghoulish, going around and bothering Kennedy people and getting stuff in advance," Rowland said.

The Web staff had done its own preparations. In conjunction with the publication of its book "Last Lion," in February, the Globe had published a seven-part series on Kennedy, including an extensive online presentation. In thinking about what new content could be developed for Kennedy's death, DiNardo said, he and his colleagues decided that "these people had just spent six months of their lives researching Kennedy's life. They have as much expertise as anybody in the country -- why not feature them?"

Eight videos, based on interviews with those reporters, were produced. Those, too, were ready Tuesday night. They were not uploaded to the site's Brightcove channel in advance, however, because "we didn't want to take the chance that something would get out somewhere before the senator had passed away," DiNardo said. But Brightcove was down when the staff tried to upload the videos early Wednesday.

The Kennedy home page went live by 2:15 a.m., with three stories and no videos, which were added a short time later. (They're also available as video podcasts on iTunes and on YouTube.) The page was built out over the next couple of hours, DiNardo said. It remained constant through the early morning until the day started and people started to react to the news.

The site also found a way to deal with the troublesome issue of comments on obituaries. Users have been able to comment on Boston.com stories for only a year or so (well after most big news sites), and DiNardo said that editors recently decided to disable comments on obituaries because they had bad experiences with relatives of the deceased seeing hurtful comments.

When Walter Cronkite died in July, the site invited people to share their memories on Legacy.com, which moderates entries on its guest books before they are posted. They took the same approach with Kennedy.

DiNardo said editors hadn't decided if comments would be enabled on Thursday's stories. "The Kennedys are a different class of story because they can inspire such a strong range of emotions in all directions," he said.

Traffic to the site Wednesday was heavy but manageable, DiNardo said. At 8 a.m. Wednesday traffic was 81 percent higher than the day before. That's a lot, DiNardo, but not even half of the traffic that resulted when the Red Sox won the World Series.

A lion, but not the Sox.