“We ought to call this thing ‘the morning miracle.’ It’s a miracle we get it out every morning.” — Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post
Every morning, I walk into my office knowing we have anywhere from 12 to 20 angry blank pages to fill.
So much has to happen just right for us to fill those pages and get them to your doorsteps every morning.
It’s really, as Bradlee put it, a miracle that it happens every day.
You’re reading a morning miracle.
The newspaper you hold in your hands (or the digital version you’re reading on a computer or mobile screen) is the result of an assembly line of skilled and creative people overcoming challenges day in and day out. Similar stories happen at newspapers all across America.
It begins in advertising, where The News’s four wonderful salespeople collect the ad revenue that supports about half of the operations at the paper. The number of and size of the ads sold determine how many pages we print in each edition.
That department depends on local businesses saying yes to sharing their story with The News’ thousands of readers. It depends on the timely collection of copy and visual elements for every ad. It depends on working servers to share that material through an online portal with our ad design studio (one time, a storm at our corporate headquarters in Wheeling, West Virginia knocked out the power there, taking down our servers, and we couldn’t communicate with the online portal for half a day).
While the ad folks sell ads, two great customer service reps at our front counter work with subscribers who walk in and call, collecting the subscription revenue that funds the other half of our operations. The number of customers we have each day (people buy, renew, and cancel subscriptions every day) determines the number of papers we print for each edition.
That department, too, depends on working computers and working software.
Once we know how many pages we’ll print the next day, the process moves to the creative services department (of one), where working computers and working software are also necessary to create digital copies of each page of the next day’s paper and lay out the ads on those digital pages. The creative services department also comes to the rescue to design ads when the ad design studio’s unavailable.
From there, the digital copies of the pages head upstairs to the newsroom, where two news reporters, one Lifestyles editor, one page designer, one assistant managing editor/sports editor, and a small team of freelance reporters put together the stories for each edition.
Reporters depend on people answering the phone or answering the door and providing the information they need to put together their stories. They depend on a bit of skill and talent to write those stories. They depend, again, on working computers and computer software.
Once all of the local stories are written and edited, the assistant managing editor, Lifestyles editor, and page designer lay out all the news, sports, and feature stories and photos — both locally produced content and wire content from the Associated Press — onto the digital copies of the pages.
The digital pages then go through yet more software to a machine that develops the plates for the press. Every edition depends on that machine working properly, and it doesn’t always. The News’ skilled press crew has to do a lot of maintenance and troubleshooting.
They have to do the same on our 50-year-old press, where the press crew hangs the plates to print each day’s edition.
From the press, it’s out to the mailroom to yet another machine (that requires yet more constant maintenance) that puts inserts into the paper and an able mailroom crew that puts labels on the papers delivered by mail and then puts together bundles for the last step in the chain: our carriers.
The News’ fantastic carriers depend on working vehicles, depend on roads being well-maintained and plowed, and depend on their own know-how to find some hard-to-reach addresses out in the most rural parts of our four-county coverage area.
All that happens in a day that begins somewhere around 7:45 a.m. with my day shift crew and ends with carriers delivering their last papers sometime around 6 a.m. the following morning (Postal Service-delivered papers come later with those subscribers’ daily mail delivery).
And then the whole miracle begins again with 12 to 20 angry blank pages.
Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.
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