Maybe this has happened to you. You drive past a stand of trees in a field or down a particular city street — you’ve been going that way for years — and then one afternoon after a late rainstorm the warm light and clean air transforms the familiar into something magical and almost unrecognizable. It’s like being reintroduced to a person or place you haven’t seen in a long time. Happened to me recently.
My son Peter, who is Dispatch general manager and as such oversees the day-to-day workings of the newspaper, has been away. During his absence, I’ve had to pay closer attention than usual to the daily operations of the newspaper. In some respects, it’s been a reintroduction of sorts.
That included two afternoons in the pressroom (in the basement of The Dispatch) for the two press runs it took to print “Best of the Triangle,” the special section published with last Sunday’s paper highlighting readers’ favorite businesses and professionals.
We print the newspaper on a Goss Urbanite built long before anyone considered printing color photographs in daily newspapers. To make a color image, the press has to make four impressions on the same spot of newsprint (four plates, black, yellow, cyan and magenta). The press crew and, as was the case last week, Dispatch advertising director Beth Proffitt and production manager Mike Floyd, check color registration as the papers come off the press. Invariably adjustments are required, and like kids on a jungle gym, the pressmen scale the sides of the rumbling machine or reach under it to turn knobs to line up the color.
Once the color is “set,” a pressman inserts a brightly colored card into the stream of newspapers flowing by conveyor to the mailroom to indicate the beginning of “good” papers. The mailroom crew removes the papers and runs them through a machine that inserts advertising circulars.
The “assembled” papers are bundled, labeled and distributed to carriers, many of whom can be found waiting and socializing in the alley behind the building.
Back to the pressroom: If you’re not doing this every day, it’s impressive to see the results our pressmen coax from our 50-year-old press. For them it’s another day on the job, but to the uninitiated, it can be stupefying. We choreograph school tours so our visitors are in the pressroom when the press is running. Even after almost 20 years it’s still thrilling — and a bit daunting — to watch the papers coming off the press, knowing very shortly they will be in the hands of readers.
Each day we make a completely new product. What was a phone conversation, an opinion or a digital image at 8 a.m. three hours later is a newspaper going out the back door.
Newspapers are created on an assembly line, of sorts. Before you pick it up in your driveway, the product is “touched” by ad reps, graphic artists, reporters, photographers and editors, production staff, press crew, mailroom staff and carriers. Each of these jobs couldn’t be more different, yet each requires tremendous expertise and attention to detail. Let me just say we have amazing people.
Today is the beginning of National Newspaper Week. We thank you for entrusting us with the responsibility of reporting news and telling the stories of our area. As I told an interviewer last week, The Dispatch’s newspaper roots go back to 1879. In 1922 my grandfather consolidated The Columbus Commercial and The Dispatch to make this newspaper.
We wouldn’t have lasted this long without skilled, dedicated people and a community that supports what we do. For that I am deeply grateful.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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