cur-mud-geon:
anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Bloggers for MyCommunityNow were invited to a meeting last Monday evening that was hosted at the relatively new Milwaukee Journal Sentinel printing facility on West Burnham south of the stadium in West Milwaukee.
I attended and was treated to a tour of that facility opened in 2003. It is truly a state-of-the-art newspaper printing plant covering three stories and some 470,000 sq. ft. The presses had just finished the run for the evening so we didn’t hear the roar of a newspaper being printed, but it was still quite an experience.
Robotic fork lift vehicles move silently back and forth picking up huge rolls of newsprint and moving each variety to the right printing press which stands three stories tall, by the way. Everything is highly automated with bar coding used extensively to manage the various functions.
An old saying holds that one should never pick a fight with a newspaper since it buys ink by the barrel. This facility receives its ink by tanker trucks. All of that is automated, as well.
The sections to be inserted into various editions are already run and kept ready in large diameter bundles that are transferred to machines where the individual inserts are fed automatically into the proper newspaper section. The inserts are tailored to the individual recipient by codes so that we each receive only those that are pertinent to our geographic area. The papers are not touched by human hands from the start of the process until handled by the carriers who make home deliveries.
This plant prints several newspapers including the daily and Sunday editions of the Journal Sentinel and others including USA Today. None of the printing is done at the downtown Journal Sentinel building although some of the old presses remain there unused. All copy layouts are received electronically and are converted to aluminum plates that ultimately produce the finished newspapers.
Those who work in this facility are very proud of the fact that they run a “green” operation on top of what used to be the largest single brown field area in Wisconsin. The newsprint is composed of at least 34% recycled material, and the inks are soy-based in keeping with the “green” ethic.
This was quite the learning experience for a former paper boy from a small town in Western Wisconsin. That wasn’t in the era of the Heidelberg Press, by the way, but close.
