News-Record.com

First, a bit of background: On a typical night, our press runs 25 tons of 27.6-pound paper at a speed of about 1,400 feet a minute. It takes about three hours to produce about 100,000 newspapers. For Sunday's paper, we start running some sections on Saturday morning. It's quite an operation.

Here are some explanations for the most common production-related blips. In each case, we try to pull any paper with defects, but we occasionally miss a few.

* A crumpled section. The papers come out of the press on a conveyer belt. If the belt runs too slowly, the papers jam into each other, not unlike the famous "I Love Lucy" candy assembly-line scene. The conveyer belt has detectors that stop the belt, but occasionally it doesn't stop in time.

* A page has a thin vertical crease. Have you ever rolled up a rug, thinking you've started it perfectly straight, only to get to the end and find that it's off-center? The same thing happens with paper. Paper is fed into our press in huge rolls. When it is slightly askew -- even as little as one-sixteenth of an inch -- a pleat can show up in the paper.

* Pages curl. Our newsprint is manufactured in a mill in Tennessee. It's loaded onto rail cars and shipped here, a journey that takes a week to 10 days. The trip, combined with the cold temperatures and low humidity, causes the paper to dry out. As a result, when water is applied to the newsprint during the printing process, it has a tendency to curl at the corner of a page. This happens more often in the winter months due to the lower humidity this time of year.

* Blank pages. When one newsprint roll is about to run out of paper, another roll is automatically pasted on to the end of the expiring roll. This causes several copies of the paper to be processed without any printing on the inside pages. These copies are pulled in our packaging department, but, on occasion, one or two slip by us and may end up being delivered to you or your neighbor.

* Every once in awhile, your paper is delivered with a piece of brown paper folded on top of it. Newspapers are packaged in bundles that are protected on the top and bottom with brown paper. Working at top speed in the darkness of the morning, a carrier will unintentionally fold the wrapping paper in with the newspaper.

* The paper is on the grass when it rains. When a paper in a plastic bag is thrown onto a driveway, the rough surface can tear the bag and let in rain water. We want to avoid that. When the paper is thrown onto the yard, it's less likely the bag will tear and more likely the grass will hold the paper above standing water.

Throughout each press run the eight-person crew checks for folds, proper ink density, wrinkles and other defects. Every shift, copies of the paper are randomly pulled and graded on more than two dozen criteria. It's not only motivational for the press crew, but it points to possible mechanical problems with the press.

It's all part of what some in the newspaper business call the daily miracle. To quote my colleague Ted Vaden, public editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, with so much paper running so fast through such a complicated piece of machinery, "it's a miracle you don't get a newsprint medicine ball each morning."

On a personal note, the photograph in this column is, in fact, me. After last week's column with the new photo, several readers asked what I did to myself. After more than 20 years with a mustache, I shaved it over Christmas. My kids still aren't used to it.