The Daily Miracle: Finding Magic Inside the Times’s Printing Plant

I feel like this article should be paired with a watching of "Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu" (1978):

https://vimeo.com/127605643

A quote from the film:

Printer: "I find it very sad. Very sad. I've learned the new stuff. The new processes and all. But I've been a printer now for 26 years. I've been in this place for 20 years. Six years apprenticeship, 20 years journeyman, and these are words that aren't just tossed around. They've always meant something to us printers.

I hate to see it. It's inevitable that we're going to go into computers. All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all locked up in a little box now called a computer. And I think probably most jobs are going to end up the same way."

Questioner: "Do you think computers are a good idea in general?"

Printer: "Oh, there's no doubt about it. They're going to benefit everybody eventually. How long it will take, I don't know."

Also:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...

Used to print the New York Times at a newspaper plant I worked at 10+ years ago now. Fun and a bit nostalgic to look at those photos and note the similarities and differences to the machines I worked on. It was/is more of an art than people realize, and in many ways set me up well for working in web development (color, attention to detail, working under time pressure, handling multiple crisis at a time as a few instances of things that translate). Due to the time spent as a newspaper printer, I follow the industry a bit and it is really sad to see how they have mismanaged the transition online so badly. But also how the printing process hasn't really changed that much even since I left - they're just riding the wave to the bottom in many cases, unfortunately.

The UK is small enough and with good railways so newspapers in the 19th century were (I think) printed in London and distributed by rail.

How did that work in the USA, before fast electronic communications? Or was it not possible to read the New York Times in, say, Texas?

As a subscriber to the paper version of the NYTimes (weekend editions), it's nice to see the behind-the-scenes of how it is printed—even though my copies are printed in a different state, I assume the process is the same.

And yes I consume news online but I like the act of timeboxing news-reading into a more thoughtful moment than how it usually plays out when reading online.