Reisers at the Daily Republic

March 29, Fairfield, CA

Our aunt Tanalee works as the Copy Editor at the Daily Republic Newspaper in Fairfield California. In this picture, Harrison and Amanda are holding up a finished "plate" for tomorrow's comics. The plate is made of metal, and is later put on the printing press, to print the newspaper.

Making a newspaper is really complicated, and takes a lot of steps. It takes a lot of people to make a newspaper, and they have their own words for each of the steps.

First, a reporter has to write the articles and fetch the photos. Some stories come from the newswire from all over the world. The name of the story files are called "slugs." Then an editor takes the stories and fixes spelling mistakes, and takes out junk lines, and gives it a headline. Next, they use a dummy sheet that has space marked out for ads to help lay out the page on the computer.

You can learn more about the history of printing books at <http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Books/booktext.html>  

The editor also gets photos from all over the world and they can make them any size they want. That is called "cropping." A picture that is only someone's face is called a "mug."

They use a computer to arrange the pictures and words on the pages. This is called "layout."

they print it on big sheets of film.

People take the film and align the colors, which is called "tapping." Other people cut ads to fit the space according to the dummy sheets and put them in. This is called "stripping."

The press prints the paper in four colors, CMYK. That is Cyan which is blue, Magenta which is red, Yellow which is yellow, and black.

Amanda learned: "The press is huge and uses great big rolls of paper that are almost as tall as me. The darkroom had one red light in it that made it so people can see but the film doesn't get ruined. There was a cool spinning door which kept the light outside of the darkroom."

Harrison learned: "In a newspaper are lots of departments, called "desks." There is a Sports Desk, Photo Desk, City Desk, and Copy Desk. Paper workers use a darkroom to work with film to make it not sensitive to light anymore."

All photos, text, and page design are Copyright (C) Robert A. Reiser, 1998-1999, All Rights Reserved, unless otherwise noted. No portion may be duplicated without prior consent from the author.

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