Photo Perspective: The Printing Press

It's usually around 2 a.m. when the editors at The Daily Pennsylvanian pick up the phone to call the printers.

For the three or four editors still at the office, the 15 minutes waiting for the confirmation call are spent uploading Internet content and cleaning the office.

When the call finally comes, the office clears out and the DP turns off its lights. For the printers, however, the night has only just begun.

The pages, which are first checked at the Philadelphia Media Holdings downtown office, are transmitted fiber-optically to the PMH plant in Conshohocken, PA, where they are digitally received and transferred to aluminum printing plates, using lasers.

Cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks - the typical colors for newspaper printing - are applied to the plates, which are then loaded into the press machines in the correct order. At the same time, one-ton rolls of printing paper are prepped and inserted into the presses.

Around 3:30 a.m., the presses start to roll and plant workers check for quality by pulling papers from the production line and tweaking the plates accordingly.

After 15 minutes of run time and constant readjustment, 14,200 copies of the DP are bound and loaded onto a truck. For a plant that puts out more than 500,000 broadsheet newspaper copies a day including the Philadelphia Inquirer and almost a million tab newspaper copies such as the Philadelphia Daily News, the DP is a short and speedy paper run.

When the trucks get to campus at around 6 a.m., four trucks deliver the papers to the 90 drop-sites around Penn's campus. And two hours later, the DP is available and ready for pick-up.

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