Dallas Morning News Printing Plant Tour

We continued on Friday with our staycation activities sponsored by the Dallas Morning News.  The DMN is offering a number of activities as outreach for their subscribers.  This was a tour of their huge printing plant on Plano Parkway in Plano.  It was a really great tour, but I did a terrible job with pictures so this blog does not do the tour justice.

The Dallas Morning News was founded in 1885 and still publishes a daily morning paper.  However the number of papers printed is only about 90,000 per day, down from a high of over 600,000 several decades ago.  I don't know how many online subscribers they have.  Their Wikipedia page says they have almost 272,00 subscribers, so the differences might be online subscribers.  In any case, this tour was about the print part of the business.

What I did not know was that the Plano printing plant also prints regional editions of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Denton Record-Chronicle. Until last week, they also printed about 25 smaller commercial customers and weekly newspapers including the Dallas Observer and Fort Worth Weekly, some local college newspapers and suburban papers.   Those were dropped effective at the end of March as a cost-cutting move.  For that reason nothing was operating when we were there Friday morning...probably a good thing for our ears, but I would have loved to see the presses in operation.

There are seven printing presses at this plant and they are HUGE.  They are at least three stories high each, and I suspect each "story" is more than normal height.  There is one press for each of the newspapers because they use different width rolls of paper.  The "extra" press functions as a backup for any potential crisis. 

A portion of each press handles each section of the paper, i.e. the sections are printing simultaneously.  The pages of each section are cut and folded by the machine, but the sections are put together by the carriers at one of the several (5?) distribution centers. The presses can do some color pages, but they do not do the colored inserts here.

One of the rolls for the New York Times (note NYT in red lettering on side).  Another roll is mounted in the ready position on the press in the back but not actually feeding through the press.  When the active roll is nearly finished, this roll will rotate into position and the blue tape on that roll will engage with the paper on the active roll, allowing the paper to begin feeding into the press.

 

These are rolls ready to move into position on the press.  The track in the foreground is for the little dollies that move them around.  The different width rolls are slightly different weights, but the tag on the NYT roll said 1678 pounds.

The paper rolls are brought in by rail car.  They keep about a month's supply of paper on site. I was impressed by how high they were stacked (5 or 6 high) given that they each weigh nearly 1700 pounds.

Some of the rolls stacked in the warehouse.

I was a little confused about the timing issues, but it was roughly like this.  The printing plant receives the fully laid out pages (from whichever newspaper) as pdf files each evening.  Cutoff times vary with each newspaper, but the cutoff time for DMN (which has the latest cutoff) was about 10:30 pm I think.  That could go later when something newsworthy is happening late, such as a late Cowboys game. 

The pdf files are used to "burn" a flexible aluminum plate for each page of the paper (or 3 additional  plates, one each for blue/red/yellow, if it is a color page).  The aluminum plates are the same size as the page and fit around a roller on the press.  They actually make two plates for each page (or eight total for each color page), since two copes of the same page are printed simultaneously. 

Most of the process to create the plates is computerized, but each plate still goes through a chemical "fixing" process.  Each aluminum plate is used only once and is then sold for scrap.

The press run (at least for the News) usually starts sometime before midnight.  They currently run only one press for the News (used to be 2).  Once up to speed, the press can produce 45,000 - 50,000 papers per hour, although there is typically a loss of 5% or so at the beginning as they get everything aligned correctly.

Once printed, the papers are immediately loaded onto trucks to take to the distribution centers.  The last of the papers produced goes to the distribution center in the basement of the printing plant.  The goal is for the papers to be to the centers by 1:30 am.  It takes the carriers several hours to put the sections together, bag the papers, and load their cars.  The carriers then leave, with the goal of the papers being on front lawns by 5:30.

It was truly fascinating, but I am glad we saw it when we did.  I worry print newspapers may not be around much longer.