“Literally a government was falling in one country and we were learning there was a nuclear meltdown in another,” Ms. Chira said.

The latest information from Japan sometimes completely changed the story that editors had worked on throughout the day in New York, just as the paper was going to print in the evening.

The events at Fukushima contributed to a newsroomwide discussion about dispersing editors around the world. Joe Kahn, who became the International editor after Ms. Chira and is now the managing editor, helped lead an effort to build out a 24-7 global news operation, which is anchored by editing hubs in London and Hong Kong. Editors can now hand off stories from one continent to the next as their local days wrap up.

One of the “key missions” of that effort, Mr. Kahn said, was to do a better job of producing important news about global affairs before readers in the United States wake up, while also serving international readers who want the news when it is relevant to them.

But time differences aren’t logistically difficult just for editors. The correspondents on the ground are continually writing new articles and feeding fresh information to their editors in different parts of the world.

The Times’s Australia bureau chief, Damien Cave, who went to New Zealand after the attacks, said one of the main challenges of that story was figuring out when to file. One night he went to bed at 3 a.m. after finishing an article and woke up three hours later to file a second by 9:30 a.m., in time to be edited before the print deadline in New York.

While The Times is a digital-first publication, print is still an important consideration. When big news breaks over the weekend, getting a story into the Sunday paper, the first deadline for which is Saturday at noon in New York, can be a challenge, “especially when your reporter is deep asleep” on the other side of the world, Mr. Slackman said .