Throughout the night, the front cover can change, sometimes up to 9 times! On stop and go production nights, which will inevitably happen a lot with the upcoming election, the printing press produces a small number of copies, then waits to change out the printing plates and add in new news, and restarts the presses all over again.
After every 10,000 copies in the @wsj printing press in the Bronx, a crew of workers carefully inspect the color ratios of the newsprint to ensure that each batch is printing correctly
At a certain point in the night, Inserts get put manually into the newspapers based on their relevant zip codes. There are approx. 300 people who work in the @wsj printing press in the Bronx, though the number has decreased with the advent of machines and robots who lift and load the various paper roles into the presses.
Continuing on the @wsj printing plant tour, each page of the newspaper uses eight different recyclable metal plates for printing. With each of the iterations that come out during the night, this can mean that up to 300 plates get used per issue, over 1,000 in the course of a night.
All lined up and ready to load: at the @wsj plant, robots (featured right) receive signals from the printing presses when the presses are running low on paper. When that happens, the robots pick up the recycled paper rolls (featured left) and carry and load them automatically into the machines. This keeps the process running seamlessly throughout the news cycle.
Robyn Spector Media 