Birth of a newspaper - How The Riverine Grazier goes from digital to physical

The finished version of January edition of the Grazier. Images - The Riverine Grazier / Margie McClelland

By Kimberly Grabham

Riverine Grazier staff road tripped to Wodonga recently to observe how the paper is transformed from a digital file into the tangible paper we pick up off the shelf on Wednesday mornings.

An illuminating experience, with many different steps and processes in the four-story building where Newsprinters Wodonga houses its multimillion dollar set up.

Marcus Kostelac is someone we have communicated with through email and phone, and it was wonderful to put a face to the name. He is the site manager, and walked us through the process.

The digital Grazier is shot off via an application called FileZilla on Tuesday mornings, with a strict deadline of 10am.

The 90 mastheads the printers deal with weekly all have strict timeslots in the printing schedule.

From there, the receiver checks it through to ensure all looks is it should, and no visible errors are present. It is then printed onto a 3mm aluminum single-use plate.

Four pages fit onto a plate, and that is why newspapers cannot fit a single page in when when it is short of room. We need enough content and advertising revenue for four pages to increase the size of our paper.

Newspapers are also printed in series of four pages on a giant big reel of paper.

From there, a machine cuts it down to the desired size.

A fold gets put in the middle, and then it gets grabbed and pulled out by a machine.

After each newspaper edition is printed, the cylinders and other parts of the printer’s production are cleaned before the next newspaper masthead’s edition is printed.

A single reel of newsprint is equivalent to 19,000 kilometres of paper.

Running at top speed, that ream of paper will last less than 15 minutes.

The printer ink is heated and maintained to a certain temperature.

It is pumped across from the big storage vats into the next building, where it is utilised.

The paper is wet during the printing process. Each aspect of production, from start to finish is carefully monitored and measured.

Wet too much and the paper will crumble, wet too little and it will tear. It needs to be stretchable.

In any printing run, hundreds of editions are sacrificed to recycling. This is necessary to get the print quality right, and the workers carefully monitor this.

They do this at great speed and efficiency, it is fascinating to watch.

Commercial inserts such as fliers and catalogues are printed onsite, and then inserted into each newspaper by a machine for some mastheads.

Printed and assembled newspapers fly in on conveyor belts, an interesting little process line. Each different newspaper’s print run is collected, wrapped in plastic, bundled and tied together, to be freighted to that particular newsroom.

They have many reels left over, like huge toilet rolls with a little left on each.

These are donated to schools and daycare centres who use it as butchers’ paper.

They also have a recycling deal with their paper supplier.

It is fascinating to look into the many different steps that it takes to produce something we rely on to be on our shelves, a finished product, week after week.