Popular Mechanics:
The paper on which tonight’s edition is being printed arrived, as it does each week, from four different paper mills—two in Quebec, one in Ontario, and one in Tennessee—where it was packaged into rolls large enough to serve as the business end of a steamroller: 2,200 pounds each and fifty inches in diameter. Eighteen-wheelers carried them to a Times storage facility in the Bronx, where more trucks took twenty rolls each from there to the plant in Queens, where manned forklifts deposited each one in a four-story warehouse that can hold 2,231 just like it.
For all of its problems and issues, The New York Times is still my favourite paper and this is a really interesting story about how it ends up in physical form.
I’m curious why the times has a two buffers… Why they don’t cut down their stock by eliminating the first transfer and buffer by taking JIT delivery direct into the later buffer. Combining that with the idea that the times’ print circulation must have declined massively would lead one to think there must be massive, and increasing, over dimensionilization of the logistics system.
As a fan of the times, and curious about more than the two points above, I’m looking forward to reading the piece.
Sadly, we no longer print our paper, but farm it out to another plant. Fondly remember those days.
I came up through commercial printing. The process still holds my attention, whether sheet- or web-fed.