During my winter vacation, I had the opportunity to visit a small newspaper office in Harbin. This paper has a daily production of between 100,000 and 150,000 copies. I say small because the population of the city is 10 million twice the population of Sierra Leone.
I had the chance to even see the printing of the newspaper and was privy to ask as many questions as possible how a newspaper is being printed. Because of development, they do web printing and those copies are printed in less than three hours and ready for the public.
First of all we can define newspaper as a printed periodical whose purpose is to deliver news and other information in an up-to-date, factual manner. Newspapers appear most commonly in daily editions, but may also be issued twice a day or weekly. While the content of a newspaper varies, it generally consists of a predetermined combination of news, opinion, and advertising.
The editorial section is written by reporters and other journalists under the supervision of the editor(s). Adverts are obtained from anybody in the case of Sierra Leone, but in China all adverts come to the newspaper directly from the advertising company or sales representatives employed by the newspapers who actively solicit local businesses for this larger, more visually oriented ad space.
Newspaper is printed on a paper called newsprint made from a combination of recycled matter and wood pulp and it is not intended to last very long. The printing press I visited is located very close to the Train station away from the editorial office because of the distribution process as I was told.
The manufacturing process is long and cumbersome. In the olden days, type was set by hand, letter by letter. A typesetter dropped small metal letters into a hand-held tray called a “stick.” The invention of the Linotype machine in 1884 made possible a quicker, more efficient method of typesetting.
German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore, Maryland invented this large, cumbersome machine that worked by casting hot lead into a line of type with the assistance of an operator who typed in the copy on a keyboard. Individual lines of type were then placed by hand onto a page form. When a page is completed, it is then sent to a stereotyping room where a curved metal plate is made from the page form. The page form is then placed on the printing press.
Modern technology has replaced the Linotype process through a method called photo typesetting. The first step in this process is the transfer of the dummy to the page layout section of the newspaper. There, an operator transfers the instructions on the dummy into a rough page prototype. A printed version may be looked over and adjusted several times by one of the reporters whose story is featured as well as by the copy editor. If another breaking story comes in, this page layout can be altered in a matter of minutes.
After the approval of the final page, the editor then sends it over to the processing room. There, the page is taken in its computer format and transferred via laser beams onto film in an image setter apparatus.
The operator then takes the film to a processor in another section of the paper, who develops it and adjusts it for its final look. Photographs are scanned into another computer terminal and inserted into the page layout. The pages that are set to be printed together are then taped down onto a device called a ‘stripper’, and the night editor checks them over once more for errors.
The strippers are then put into frames on light-sensitive film, and the image of each page is burned onto the film. The film of each page is inserted into a laser reader, a large facsimile machine that scans the page and digitally transfers the images to the printing center of the newspaper.
At the printing center, the pages arrive at the laser room and are put through a laser writer, another scanning device that makes a negative image of them. In the negative image of the page, the text is white while the blank spaces are black, fascinating to see. The final images of each page are further adjusted. This last minute adjustment may involve fine-tuning of the colored sections and retouching photographs.
From these negatives, the forms from which the paper will be printed are composed in a plate making room. The films of the page do two pages at a time and then placed on a lighted box. The next process is an aluminum plate containing a light-sensitive coating that is placed on top of the image of the pages.
The light box is then switched on, and an ultraviolet light develops the image of the pages onto the aluminum plate. The plate is then bent at the edges so that it will fit into the printing machine or the press as the Chinese call it and is fitted onto the plate cylinders.
The plate of each page next move on to the actual printing press, without exaggeration the machine is as big as a two-story building. When the machine started running then I understood why all the workers wear earplugs. It was deafening for me so I too had to wear one.
This method of printing is what they refer to as ‘web offset’. The web refers to the large sheets of blank newsprint that are inserted in rolls, weighing up to a ton. The reels of newsprint are loaded in at the bottom floor of the press. The rolls are inserted onto a reel stand, which has three components: the first reel brings a roll of paper up to the press; a second is loaded and ready to replace the first roll when it runs out, and the third reel stays empty and ready to be fed with another when the first reel is almost finished.
Each roll of blank newsprint has double-sided tape at its edges, so that when one roll runs out in the press, another smoothly takes up where the other left off without interrupting the printing process.
The plate cylinders then press the image of the page onto a blanket cylinder, leaving a version of the page’s image on the cylinder’s soft material. When the paper runs through the press, the blanket cylinder presses the image onto it. Chemical reaction of the ink, which contains oil and the squirting of jets of water into the process, result in the actual newspaper page or colored images on a white background.
Since oil and water do not mix, the areas where ink should adhere to the page are black or colored, and water washes away the parts where ink is not needed. This is why this printing process is referred to as “offset.”
Next, the large sheets of printed newsprint move on to another large piece of machinery called a folder. There, the pages are cut individually and folded in order. This entire printing process can move as fast as 100,000 copies per hour, but the manager of the press told me that they adjust it to produce 50,000 copies per hour.
During the printing process, the printers and manager check the machines and every five minutes take copies and scan them for printing malfunctions in color, order and readability. As the printing copies come out, the conveyor belt moves them into a mail room section of the plant, where they are stacked into a quires of 25 copies. The quires then move to another section where a machine wraps them in plastic and these bundles are ready to be loaded onto delivery trucks for distribution.
This newspaper is full color and during the process I saw the inks as they were in drums of 10 gallons each and they use four colors: black, cyan (blue), Magenta (reddish) and yellow.
It was a very interesting scene as it was my first time to see such a one-stop printing machine that produces so much quantity. The process of ours in Sierra Leone is almost the same only for the compartments that these one-stop machine has. We have to collate our own copies by hand and have to be changing plates regularly. Also the length of time we take to print 1,000 copies is ridiculous as we spend the whole night.
I hope in the near future the country will have such a machine that can help print quality colored newspapers that will boost the industry to a higher height.
The printing machine is manufactured in China with all the Chinese characters, when I asked the manager that if I want to buy the machine how can I change the characters to alphabets, he laughed and said the machine has the alphabets its just matter of reprogramming it. Indeed I have never in my life seen such a printing machine so big.
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