An Insider's View of the Daily Newspaper

My intention when I started this blog was to write about my adventures that others might want to consider experiencing. Today's adventure, however, was by invitation only. I was invited with 8 other women to the offices of The Citrus County Chronicle at Meadowcrest in Crystal River for lunch and a tour. The Chronicle is a daily local newspaper. There's no better source for local news than The Chronicle. What makes the 9 of us at the paper today so special? We all contribute articles regularly to the monthly community newspaper, The Pinnacle. Citrus County is divided into several local communities and these communities each have a monthly local. It's helpful for advertisers to really target their ads to the locales where they'd like to do work. I live within the area of The Pinnacle. I write articles as the head of a community book club and as the publicity director for my club, Citrus  Newcomers Club. (Visit the Citrus Newcomers website for more information about the club.)

We had the opportunity to meet our main contact, Rochelle, and the two women who manage the Community Desk. It was so much fun.

Some history about the paper can be read at The Chronicle's website.

The main offices of The Chronicle

I am sure there's a story behind the decorated newspaper
boxes outside the offices.

Unfortunately, very little printing goes on on Mondays during the day. The daily papers get printed overnight. Monthlies and all of the other "special edition" papers are printed during the day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday. It would have been fun to see the press in action. We joked that it would have been fun for someone to yell out, "Stop the press!"

Lindsey was the fellow who gave us our tour. After the material is gathered and edited and laid out, everything goes to the room where the plates are created. That was the first stop on our tour. There was absolutely nothing going on in the plate room on a Monday. There wasn't even a plate that we could look at! At first glance, I thought that the machine that creates the plates looks like an overly large home printer. I was told it's kind of like that.

From there we went to the room where the paper is printed. Massive numbers of pages can be printed in an hour. We saw where the paper was loaded and where the colors are applied. We learned about the sizes of the different papers and about the weight of the paper used to print newspapers.

This is the printing press.

Usually about a month's worth of paper is stored at the
paper at any time. This way if there's a problem at the
paper mill, the paper can still be printed.

Lindsey giving us information about the size
and weight of the paper. The pink paper is special
ordered for breast cancer awareness. Lindsey told
us that the entire paper is printed one day on the
pink paper. I might be wrong but I think that the
pink paper is also used for some special advertisements
in the newspaper. At least that's what I think.

These are some big ink cartridges!

The last stop on our tour was in the room where inserts are placed into each copy of the paper prior to stacking, tying and getting the papers ready for delivery. Lindsey told us that the machines that handle this are so smart. They can tell if an insert was omitted or if more than one particular insert was placed in more than once. If so, the paper stays in the machine and goes around a second time to get the inserts placed in just right. Human hands don't touch the papers - or the inserts - until the papers are ready to be loaded onto the trucks.

Inserts get placed into the paper here.

A sneaky peak at this coming Sunday's Comics.

The parent company is called Citrus Publishing and they print over 20 papers on a regular basis. Papers are distributed in Citrus County, Sumter County and north.

Just some of the papers published in Citrus County.

The few hours spent at The Chronicle today were interesting and informative. It was also nice to meet other women who are doing the same thing that I'm doing on a regular basis.

I hope that the next adventure that I write about will be something that others might easily be able to experience. Stay tuned.