Newspapers... At the Production Department :

The printing process

In our previous article, we enlightened you on newspaper formats, jargon and staff. Today, as promised, we will bring you some interesting facts about the pre-press and printing process, that is, what happens at the editorial level, and then at the press.

How many of you have visited a newspaper office and observed how the paper is printed using modern

 technology? Those of you who have, would have found it very fascinating, because one could hardly believe that just a plain reel of newsprint (or paper) which is at one end of a machine, comes out as a newspaper, folded too, at the other end...

So, for the benefit of those who have no clue as to how this operation is done, let's take a peek into the workings of the editorial and press.

Pre-press process

There may be many of you who contribute to the Junior Observer by way of drawings and articles. Let's see what happens to all the articles you send, and also what other contributors and reporters give...

The articles come in many forms; some are typed, some handwritten and others 'keyed' in or typed using computers and produced as computer printouts.

These copies are read and those suitable for publication are selected by the editor or the relevant desk heads of

the sections and passed on to the sub-editors for editing. The subs, as they are referred to, not only correct the grammar and spellings, give headlines, strap lines and blurbs, but also find suitable photographs or sketches to illustrate the articles and enhance the layout of the page.

Once these areas are under control, all the handwritten and typed articles are sent to the Visual Display Terminal (VDT) section for computer setting.

Next comes the page-make up stage. This is usually done by a graphic designer or page-make up/layout artist as they are also known.

The pages are designed on a template sent as a document to the graphic artists via the computer network from

 the production, marking the areas taken up for advertisements.

The copies or articles and photographs for pages are accessed by the graphic designers using codes given by the subs. Once the pages are designed using computer software, computer printouts are taken to proof-read them for any corrections or changes to be made.

It is only then that the pages are finalised and sent back via the computer to the Production Department to be stored in page servers.

The Production handles all the technicalities involved in preparing the pages for printing, by obtaining negatives from the pages sent as documents by each editorial section.

The negatives are similar to the negatives of photographs. But they are much larger; the actual size of the

newspaper. If there are any major errors, especially picture mix-ups or headline mistakes, they could be spotted and corrected at this stage.

Since the Junior Observer is a full colour paper, four sets of negatives are taken for the pages in the four basic colours; cyan,magenta, yellow and black, known as CMYK in short.

In order to get negatives, all the pages in the servers are processed at the image setting section. Then the negatives or films are 'coupled'; they are put into order because two pages are printed as a double spread. in one sheet of paper on one side and another two on the reverse.

They are developed on a layout table. Once this process is completed and all the pages are sorted out in the

 order they would appear in print, 'plates' are made from the negatives at the plate making section. Plates are cast out of aluminium and are chemically coated.

The negatives are placed on a table in a room covered with black curtains, and imprints of the negatives are made in the plates, using a purple light. It's similar to developing a photograph. This is a complex process, so we'll now look into what happens to the plates...

Printing process

The most interesting part in newspaper publishing is the printing process. The noisiest place at Lake House is the press, where all the machinery is at work.

Sometimes the noise made by the machinery is like a train picking up speed. Those of you who have visited a newspaper press would be certainly familiar with this sound.

Well, getting back to the printing process, there are gigantic machines that are used to print the different papers. The plates are placed on what are known as 'drums' on these machines.

There is a special section and staff too that controls the amount of ink (in the four different colours) released,

 for colour printing. Even when it comes to black and white or non colour printing, the ink is released carefully in order to avoid smudging.

We will however not go into the intricacies of this particular process, but can tell you that the pages that are imaged on the plates are fully printed on the news reel and end up as the news pages you see in the newspaper you get in the market.

Newspapers are usually printed on inexpensive, off-white paper known as newsprint. Since the 1980s, the newspaper industry has largely moved away from lower-quality letter press/printing to higher-quality, four colour process and offset printing.

In addition desktop computers, computer software, graphic software, digital cameras and digital pre-press and typesetting technologies have modernised the newspaper production process.

Don't you think the way in which a copy or article you send ends up as printed matter is

 simply amazing?

Why not organise a trip to a newspaper office and check out for yourselves how a paper is printed because we cannot go into all the fascinating details in an article?

Besides, seeing it for yourselves would certainly be more interesting than just reading about it.

Janani Amarasekara