How The New York Times is made

• Queens printing plant produces 41% of the publication's daily papers.  
• 80,000 copies of the paper are printed every hour.
• We got a peek behind the scenes to learn the paper is made.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories. 

Following is a transcript of the video.

 

This 10-mile-long roll of newsprint paper alone will soon turn into 30,000 copies of The New York Times that will be on the newsstands and doorsteps of thousands of people in about five hours. It's 10 p.m. in the College Point neighborhood of Queens, New York, and the shift has just started for the workers at this printing plant who will meticulously work through the early morning until 3 a.m. to print one of the most respected journalistic publications in the world. 

That paper you will read in the morning over your cup of coffee probably will have come from one of these 27 different printing plants, passed through hundreds of hands, and been inspected by thousands of pairs of eyes before landing in your hands. 

We visited this 300,000-square-foot printing facility in Queens to find out all that goes into this process. 

Although The Times is printed across the country, the Queens printing plant produces nearly 41% of the publication's daily papers.  

And when almost 80,000 copies of the paper are printed every hour, timing is everything! 

Mike Conners: Getting the paper out is an equation. We're graded every day on our arrival times. We have 52 trucks that go out, for example, most nights. If they're on time, we get 100%. If a couple are late, it decrements from there. We're measured every morning on how our arrival times are. 

First, a digital copy of the newspaper is sent to the printing plant. This paper is the final version that the editors, writers, and copy editors sign off on to be printed.

From there, each page of the newspaper is digitally transferred to a plate using a laser machine. A plate is a sheet of aluminum that contains the image of a newspaper page on it. Each plate is equivalent to a single page of the newspaper.

The plates are made in a room with special yellow lighting that helps protect the plate's muted image from exposure. This is what will eventually transfer to paper, but we'll get to more of that later.

Plates that are ready to go to printing are stored in groupings based on the section they'll be in in the actual newspaper. This helps keep the plates organized and lets everyone know where each plate belongs in the printing stage.

While the printing of the plates is taking place, giant rolls of paper are being transported by clamp trucks, which hug the roll to move it around. 

These rolls of newsprint are stacked and stored in a large warehouse. Each roll is 10 miles long and makes 30,000 newspapers.-

When the rolls are ready to be used, the outside paper on the roll is removed by hand. 

The paper is now ready to be brought over to the pressing machines. 

But before the printing happens, the damaged parts of the paper roll must be removed. Wrinkled or damaged paper can't be used for printing, so that portion of the roll is recycled.

Now, this is where the true magic happens — the printing of the paper! The plates are individually put into the press cylinder by hand, and they're purposely connected to one another so they print in the direction the newspaper reads.

And, of course, there would be no newspaper without the ink. To print that many newspapers in a single night, massive amounts of ink are stored in extra-large containers and transported to each printing press through metal pipes. 

As the cylinders begin turning, ink gets splashed onto the muted image on the plates, and then that image gets transferred to a sheet of printing paper, creating the physical copy of the newspaper.

Although the process needs to be quick and efficient, the printing plant doesn't sacrifice quality. It's about 3 a.m. at this point of the process, but the employees meticulously inspect the paper for quality control as it's coming down the assembly line. Employees will look at the alignment of the paper and the coloring, making sure all of the imagery has transferred correctly.

A large ruler that can accommodate the dimensions of the paper is used to check the positioning of the columns on each page. 

Once the papers are ready to go, they're wrapped up and shipped out to land on the doorsteps of their readers by early morning. 

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