A year�s worth of
Journals amounts
to millions of papers

By Jennifer Walkling
Journal Staff Writer

Visitors to The Journal frequently ask the same questions: How much do rolls of newsprint weigh, how old are the presses � and where is Ann Landers?

Well to start, Landers doesn�t work here . We buy her column, along with a number of other regular features in The Journal, such as the comic strips, horoscopes, Martha Stewart and Dave Barry. But nearly 400 other people work here and do a variety of jobs that make a daily newspaper happen.

Of those jobs, the ones that get the most attention from visitors are in the pressroom, where pressmen (there are no women) work on massive machines that have been turning out Journals since 1954. Dinosaurs in terms of technology, they will be replaced with the addition of our new printing plant in about two years.

Feeding these giant beasts are rolls of newsprint, the plain white paper on which we print the news and advertising. Rolls vary in width and weigh 900-1,600 pounds. Cradled on wheeled dollys, they are rolled along railroad-style tracks in the basement into position to be fastened to the massive press units looming above.

Our newsprint comes from Canadian mills, and last year we used 23,596,555 pounds of it. Each roll is reportedly more than 6 miles long, and we figure we get about 85 pages out of a pound of newsprint. A majority of it is recycled.

The 10,000-plus gallons of color ink we use each year does not include one of the most colorful spots in the paper: the Sunday Comics section. The comics are not printed in house.

It takes about three hours to print 90,000 papers daily and about four and a half hours to print 107,000 Sunday papers. It then takes 84 drivers covering Genesee, Lapeer and Shiawassee counties along with parts of Livingston, Tuscola and Oakland counties, to get the paper to your door.

Staff writer Jennifer Walkling started at The Journal in 1977. She can be reached at (810) 766-6241 or jwalkling@flintjournal.com.