Related: A visit to the printer in West Virginia, or how I learned to love the CT
Ideally, all this happens by deadline and the printer doesn't hate us for delaying the process. But we certainly do not live in a utopia, so unfortunately our end of the paper does occasionally arrive in Bluefield past deadline.
Last week, several Collegiate Times staffers took a trip to our printer's plant in Bluefield, WVa., to get a better idea of how our actions here in Blacksburg affect the printing process an hour-and-a-half away in Bluefield.
Peter Velz, one of our multimedia reporters, recorded the day in the newsroom leading up to the trip. The video can be seen on our Web site in the multimedia section. If you've read my columns so far this semester and are curious to put faces to the names I've been dropping, check out the video and get a glimpse of a day in the newsroom and the people who fill it.
Our editorial adviser suggested the idea to our editor-in-chief and managing editors some time ago, and they decided it should be a field trip for the entire staff.
It was to be a learning experience. Reporters, copy editors and section editors alike were invited to go in order to see how their actions affect the production and delivery of the paper down to the minute. The goal was to expose every level of the editorial hierarchy to the process so that they may all better understand the daily (and nightly) course of events.
The video begins with a synopsis of a day in the scheme of filling the paper and an introduction of the editorial staff.
Bethany Buchanan, features editor, and her reporters are shown at their weekly section meeting. T. Rees Shapiro, campus news editor, is caught dancing in the middle of the office floor (which happens frequently, believe me).
Thandiwe Ogbonna, copy editor, explains how she reads and re-reads stories not just on the server but after they are placed on the page for errors in style, grammar and mechanics.
Layout designers and photo editors demonstrate how they lay out the pages and crop or adjust the photos.
The pages were turned into PDFs and sent to the printer by deadline last Tuesday evening, and then the intrepid adventurers departed from the office in Squires around 11 p.m. The staffers arrived at the plant around 12:30 a.m. and met with Leigh McVey, Bluefield Daily Telegraph printing and production guru, who gave a brief explanation of what they would see before they toured the plant.
Each night, we turn out Adobe InDesign pages into PDF format before sending them to the printer. These pages are then turned into huge negatives of each paired page. For example, the first and last pages are on the same negative because they are on the same sheet of newsprint in the paper. These negatives are then used to generate metal plates that are used to impress images on newsprint.
The finished, collated product that comes out of the press at this point are sent to a room where about 15 people add any inserts or special sections inside go between the fold. If there are no inserts, the pages are sent to a machine that counts and stacks them, then forwarded on to another machine that binds and folds them into bundles of 50. From there, the papers are loaded onto a van and take the 1.5-hour drive back to Blacksburg to fill many newsstands throughout campus and town.
We recently switched to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph from one that was closer to Blacksburg. Since the switch, the quality of the printed issues has improved, and we are very thankful for Bluefield's hard work and initiative. There have been times when Leigh has called the newsroom to inform us that the date on the front page was wrong and that she fixed it for us before print. So, big thanks to Leigh for being our copy editor from afar.
The video is short and it's interesting. I encourage anyone who has ever wondered how or why stories make it to the page to watch it. We like to think we're a fun bunch, and I think the video's laid-back nature will let each of you see that. Check it out in the multimedia section of collegiatetimes.com, "A visit to the printer in West Virginia, or how I learned to love the CT."
printer field trip, ct newsroom, multimedia
