Hey, there. Slow down just a minute.
It’s all right; the rest of the newspaper will be here for you when you get back.
News is as ubiquitous as oxygen these days — it’s just everywhere — but that only makes it harder to believe that it actually comes from anywhere. So, come, take a journey with us.
Rub your thumb and forefinger across the familiar newsprint that you’re holding right now and transport yourself to a vast factory floor where 4-foot-high blank rolls of this paper are lined up in neat rows like late-summer hay bales.
There’s a soft-spoken man standing next to you named Brian Lane, The Denver Post’s pressroom manager. He has a graying beard and kind eyes, and he has been a newspaper pressman for more than 30 years, following in the footsteps of his dad, who was a pressman, too.
Brian is looking out at those rolls of paper as laser-guided robots drive them across the floor to two men who will load them into German-made machines. And there’s a little twinkle in those eyes gazing at this bit of mundane magic.
“Basically,” he says, “this is where it starts.”
That’s the thing about The Post: It comes from somewhere. Written primarily in a downtown Denver newsroom, printed at a plant in southern Adams County, dispersed to 17 different distribution centers around the state and then delivered from the cars of more than 600 carriers, every Post is the work of human hands.
The work goes on around-the-clock. As the last of the morning’s papers thump onto driveways, the first reporters of the day arrive at work. As the last reporter leaves the office at night, delivery trucks are only just beginning to rumble.
This goes on regardless of the weather, regardless of holidays, regardless of technology breakdowns. Some Denver Posts travel hundreds of miles each day to reach their destinations, crossing mountain passes and diving deep into the plains.
“It’s a miracle that we get it done everyday,” says Brian Trujillo, the paper’s circulation director.
And that’s what you sometimes hear people in the hallways call it: Our daily miracle.
Of course, every miracle has a reason why it happens. So let’s continue our journey.
Once loaded into the machines, the paper flies upstairs to one of five printing presses. To print an average Denver Post, you only need one or two of the presses — the rest are used to print nearly every other newspaper distributed in Colorado. But even just one press is a force to behold.
Papers surge through its rollers and rush out on a conveyor belt at upward of 60,000 copies per hour. Tongs on another belt grab them and spiral them into the sky on a flight to the packaging room. The floor vibrates a bass line, the presses trill a melody and there is music in the machinery’s rhythm.
By now, it’s past 1 a.m. in the paper’s daily life, and that’s only the beginning of the work.
Once in the packaging room, workers collate the paper for distribution — every copy is touched by someone as they load it into machines. In a given month, workers on the floor will touch 60 million different sections that need to be folded into one another across everything that the plant prints, says Hal Mortensen, director of transportation and packaging for The Post.
From there, trucks head to the distribution centers, where carriers are waiting in the dark hours of morning. They load the papers into their cars — sometimes as many as 400 papers per carrier — and are off on their routes. By 6 a.m., every copy should have hit a doorstep, but the newspaper’s lifecycle has already moved on.
Early-rising reporters, photographers, editors and digital news producers are heading to the newsroom. There are calls to be made, stories to be written and posted online. By 9:30 a.m., the time of the first editors’ meeting of the day, the newsroom’s open clusters of desks buzz with the day’s events, and by midafternoon, they fall quieter in the focused intensity of deadline.
Advertising representatives are at work, too, selling the ads that are the paper’s financial lifeblood.
Stories are copy edited, and pages are laid out by designers and then proofed. By 10:30 p.m. most nights, the last of the pages have zipped digitally to the printing plant, and the newsroom’s pulse slackens even as the pressroom’s quickens.
The robots move the rolls. The men load the papers into the machines. The hypnotic cycle turns over, and our journey is now concluded.
So, feel that paper in your hands again.
In any year, The Denver Post will print 100 million copies. The printing plant will use more than 12,000 metric tons of paper.
Pick a random day — say, Friday, Sept. 15. There were 45 different stories in the paper that day, not counting briefs and other short pieces. That was more than 26,000 words of news written, edited and placed on the page in a single day, a pace that puts The Post on track to publish the word count equivalent of “War and Peace” at least 16 times during the year. Online that Friday, digital producers posted 110 different stories, which racked up more than 1 million page views from more than 329,000 unique readers.
Thousands of people worked together in this effort.
Every miracle has a reason why it happens.
“Some people would say it’s a daily miracle,” Mortensen says.
He grins.
“It’s a lot of dedication. It’s a lot of hard work. Without that, the miracle wouldn’t happen.”
