What, you don't like our retro look?
I don't have any sense of how many of the readers of the blog are also readers of the paper, but here's why some of the newspapers had an absence of color on the local front and the sports front this morning, according to our production director, Jim Schrum:
"With about 6,000 copies of the High Point edition remaining to be printed, we had to stop the press and drop the color from the following pages of this morning's paper: B1, B12, C1, C12. The press unit in question (unit 5) was tearing up blankets. The decision was made to drop the color in order to get through the run. Our mechanical staff will get into the unit today to determine the nature of the problem and fix it." (A blanket is the device that actually puts ink onto the paper.)
It's a complicated piece of machinery, this press.
Comments (5)
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You seem to have some "issues" with the High Point editions lately. Is this a conspiracy? Is it karma?
Posted on October 26, 2004 2:19 PM
Hmmm. I live in Greensboro, but apparently I get the High Point edition.
Posted on October 26, 2004 4:01 PM
Actually JW, if it were something as organized as a conspiracy, I'd know what time to set my alarm clock to come into the pressroom!
(I'm the production operations manager, in addition to being a reader.)
The issue Friday night happened very early, during our "pre run" of HomeLife and Classifieds sections. Since we lose 20-30 minutes of run time for each edition change in our "live run", we made the difficult decision to combine the High Point and City editions. Those two editions have a lot more in common with each other than the Rockingham edition has with either, both in news content and advertising. Kudos to the newsroom for doing an on-the-fly revamp of the Greensboro B-section to include more High Point content very late that night, and apologies to the High Point advertisers who were left out.
The issue last night happened, as noted in Jim's message, about 2/3 the way through the High Point edition. The color loss on B1, B12, C1 and C12 hit the balance of the High Point edition and all of the Greensboro edition. Patrick, you can tell which edition you get by looking at the header on page B1.
Rest assured that our maintenance staff is addressing these issues on our 28-year-old mostly-reliable printing press. However, we have had a rough couple of weeks here. As John said, it's a complicated piece of machinery, this press.
Posted on October 26, 2004 6:09 PM
Patrick, I'm pretty sure you get the Greensboro edition. I didn't make it clear in the original post -- although Dawn does in her comment -- that no Greensboro paper had color on those pages, either.
Posted on October 26, 2004 9:13 PM
I toured hte N&R and saw your printing equipment earlier this year. As a mechanical engineer looking at your process, I knew that know amount of maintenance could prevent the occasional breakdown at just the wrong time.
I continue to be impressed with the printing and distribution network that has my paper in my driveway before 6am every day, even in serious snow.
Posted on October 27, 2004 2:43 PM