The Korea Times will now publish articles from New York Times for Kids monthly for young Korean American readers.
A NEWSPAER, like the one you’re holding in your hands, is a printed collection of articles, and each article begins as an idea.
The process of transforming ideas into articles involves many different people, including
reporters, who conduct interviews, seach through documents, observe live events and write about what they learned; visual artists, who start photographs, draw illustrtions and design graphics; and editors, who help shape articles.
On average, The New York Times produces more than 200 articles every day. Designers take those articles and assemble them, along with artwork, into a digital version of the newspaper. But what happens next?
How do printed newspapers end up on your doorstep, delivered every single morning long before you leave for school? Here’s how this copy of The New York Times for Kids got to you.
Stephen Hiltner
1. NAVIAGATING THE PLANET
The New York Time’s main print and distribution facility, in College Point, Queens, is so sprawling that employees often ride adult-size tricycles to get from one end to the other. Up to 800,000 newspapers can be printed there every day.(The Times also uses 26 other print sites around the United States, and several more around the world.)
2. BURNING PLATES
Digital Images of the newspaper, which are created in the newsroom at our eadquarters near Times Square, ore transmitted to College Point’s“plate room.” where lasers burn them onto the aluminum sheets. Those plates-1,400 everyday-are then locked into place on cylinders within the printing presses.
3. HANDLING NEWSPRINT
Newspaper is shipped to College Point from Canada in rolls that weigh 2,000 pounds each.(A single roll of newsprint holds so much paper that if you took one out to the street and gave it a shove, it would unspool for 10 miles. Please don’t do this.) Paper handlers, with help from self-driving robotic forklifts, load the rolls into a set of reels, which continously feed the newsprint to the printing pressed above.
4. HANDLING INK
Around 450 gallons of ink are loaded into the presses every day. And forget those peaky plastic ink cartridges that you’ve probably dealt with at home: This ink, thick and goopy, is shipped to College Point via tanker trucks and stored on-site in large vats.
5. PRINTING
The printing presses themselves, seven in all, are several stories tall. When running at full speed, they generate a deafing amount of moise-so loud that you can print up to 80,000 newspapers per hour.
6. CUT AND FOLD
After the ink is applied, the newsprint is folded in half, then cut apart by a rotating blade into individual sections. As with so many other elements of the presses, timing is crucial: If the blade is even a split-second off, it will cut the wrong part of the page.
7. CONVEYING
As they roll off the presses, the newspapers, now in final form, pass through a network of conveyor belts(College Point has 14 mile’s worth of conveyor belts) that carry them, dangling overhead, to the building’s distribution wing.
8. STACKING AND BUNDLING
The newspapers are then stacked into 30-pound bundles, each of which is secured with two plastic straps. The bundles are placed on pallets(48 bundles to a pallet) and covered in protective shrink-wrap.
9. THE DELIVERY TRUCKS
Using a fleet of 127 delivery trucks(each filled with a dozen or so pallets), drivers fan out from the College Point, distributing the papers along the East Coast-as for north as Albany and as far south of Atlantic City.
10. THE PAPER ROUTES
Newspaper deliverers meet at distribution points. where they collect bundles of newspapers from the delivery trucks, place the papers in individual blue bags-or, in Manhattan, wrap the rubber at subscriber’s doorsteps.(Retail copies, including the stacks you see at coffee shops and convenience stores, are first delivered to warehouses, then distributed from there.)
