Charlotte the Useless Ghost

The kind that makes newspapers. I know, I know, newspapers are dead, facebook killed them, but listen, it's a bunch of big machines that go whrrrr and kerchunk and fdddddd and make things at a rate you can measure in miles per hour. Beasts the size of a warehouse that take big rolls of paper you need a forklift for one after the other and spit out complete folded print media bound into packages you can pile up on a truck and chuck out on the curb because who cares if you lose one or two

so if you haven't seen a newspaper printing press, go watch a video:

• here's the how it's made segment on it, which goes step-by-step;
• here's a more modern video that talks about the process at the new york times printing plant in queens three years ago;
• and here's one of my favorite ever documentaries, Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu, made by members of the new york times press team about the last night of "hot typesetting" in 1978: molten lead, linotype machines, fitting text into forms and creating heavy plates; and the early transition into "cold typesetting", or some of the very first computerized generation of type, which was then cut and paste onto a page and imaged. this documentary doesn't focus much on the press itself (that starts up around 19:50) but instead the process that happens before ink hits paper, because if you watch all these videos you'll learn that the press process has not fundamentally changed in decades.

my dad went to school to be a journalist and worked in local dailies for decades. he worked from the end of the linotype era until the beginning of what i call the centralized printing era, and so i've gotten more than my fair share of watching the webs fly by over the ink-stained hands of press workers.

in fact everywhere i've ever lived has had an operating printing press, with the exception of about a year and a half; the newspaper where i lived lost its printing contract with USA Today, a nation-wide daily newspaper that printed in dozens of presses across the country, about a year and a half before i moved to seattle. USA Today was likely the only other daily that was printed at that press.

larger cities, which had access to more capital and a larger workforce, started to print the local daily newspapers for towns hours away by truck. smaller presses closed down. delivery times shifted later and later; press deadlines creeped earlier and earlier¹. newspapers that shut down their presses were worth less money; they couldn't print for other publications and make money on that, so their owners got out and sold to private capital, which gutted nearly every local newspaper to try and squeeze the last cents out of them.

i disagree with the idea that facebook killed newspapers. they were long dead before facebook and google became the one-two punch of news aggregation and ad systems that ultimately cut off the critical revenue streams of local journalism. the printing process itself had pretty much been figured out and perfected; the only way to squeeze every dollar out of it was to make the presses run 24/7. and so local presses folded, and the capitalists ran away with the profits.

(edit: replaced the last link with a better one)

1. where my dad worked the longest was actually an evening paper, with a 1pm press deadline. the newsroom workers would work normal hours, and produce that day's paper in the morning, then plan the next day's paper in the afternoon while it was printing. my dad rarely had to work evenings. sometime after we moved away, their parent company closed their presses, and they had to switch to morning delivery and a ~10pm press deadline to accommodate how long it takes to truck newspapers from two hours away, because nobody wanted their paper delivered at 8pm.