Ever wonder how The Jasper Local gets created? 

After the stories are collected and written, after the photos are snapped and selected, and after the advertisements are booked and approved—and then once our art director puts everything  together in an eye-catching layout—it’s time to send the files to print. For six years The Jasper Local has uploaded its digital documents to Great West Newspaper’s Gazette Press in St. Albert, and for six years the folks who work there have magically transformed those files into a stack of newspapers, ready for distribution.

But is it magic? We weren’t sure…we’d never actually taken the time to visit the plant, let alone get an understanding of what the printing process looks like. 

For our six year anniversary issue, we wanted to do just that. Join us behind the scenes to take a look at how The Jasper Local gets into your hands. Spoiler alert: there’s definitely some magic involved!

Deadline Day

For journalists all over the world, deadline anxiety is a very real thing. And while the stress of meeting the deadlines for our twice-monthly alternative newspaper is a far cry from the pressure cooker atmosphere at a major daily, where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising might be riding on a single issue, the paper still has to come together in a way that respects the workload of everyone on the team. When we tell our press that files will be uploaded at a certain time, we’re mindful of the fact that Gazette Press prints about 50 other different newspapers in a given week and any delays can back up the whole system.  

“I always tell my clients, I can’t print what I don’t got,” laughs John van Huizen, Gazette Press print sales manager and The Jasper Local’s first point of contact if we need to beg for a deadline extension.

When we finally do upload the latest issue of the newspaper to the printer, it’s not exactly like sending a photo of your cat to your dusty inkjet. Once the files are received by digital prepress manager Dave Chrapko, a precise series of steps involving highly technical equipment, German-engineered software and a six-person crew of experts begins to unfold. Stepping into Chrapko’s office feels a little bit like you’re entering the bridge on the Starship Enterprise. An air-lock door hisses behind you as you cross into the humidity-controlled chamber. A panel of screens display the current job, where Chrapko can double check that the colours look good, no font issues exist and overall, the files are non-corrupt. 

If the pre-press room is the Starship’s bridge, then the three-storey press hall housing the press, one of the most versatile and efficient printing machines in the world, is the warp engine nacelle, tractor beam projector and the photon torpedo bay, combined. As it fires up, thousands of components begin to whirr and hum in a symphony of high-tech synchronization. When the press was built six years ago, it took six weeks to pour the concrete slabs needed to support the 365 tonne machine. Engineers took three-and-a-half months to assemble it. When running at full speed, it can print up to 40,000 copies of a 96 page tabloid or a 72 page broadsheet newspaper in six sections, per hour. On smaller page counts, it can run up to 80,000 copies per hour.

The Jasper Local requires significantly less capacity than that. However, before our digital files get spit out the other end of the press as a newspaper, they must first be “plated.” This is Chrapko’s domain. After getting the green light from the client and ensuring no problems exist with the file, software separates each individual page of the paper by the four components of the CMYK colour model (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Two AGFA platesetters, each capable of outputting 100 plates per hour, laser etch images of the newspaper pages onto coated aluminum plates. The plates are attached to huge rollers on the press known as plate cylinders, which pick up ink from the ink fountains, transfer that ink onto on a rubber “blanket” cylinder, which then “offsets” the image onto the newsprint as it travels through the press (hence the term offset printing). An eight page, full colour tabloid paper like ours requires only 16 of these plates, but when Chrapko is working with a 72 page, six section broadsheet produced by the Edmonton Journal, for example, it requires as many as 96 plates.

“Where It used to take a crew of upwards of 12 men to print the Edmonton Journal,” van Huizen explained. “we run the with Journal with two or three guys.”

Six years ago, the Great West ownership group (which operates 19 newspapers across Alberta including the St. Albert Gazette, its flagship paper) made the decision to invest in their current production facility. The old plant was aging, had limited capacity and wasn’t what the company needed to take their business into the future, van Huizen said. Even in an era where newspapers across the country were closing shop, Great West was investing in journalism, something they continue to view as their core strength. The reason, van Huizen says, is because strong journalism is the key to a successful newspaper business model.

“You’ve first got to have good editorial content,” he said. “That brings readership, and if you have good readership, that makes it compelling for advertisers to place ads in the newspaper and that brings in the revenue that makes all of this possible”.

Back in the press room, head pressman Michael Dorie has received the plates from Chrapko and is getting ready to hit the on switch. When he does, four different ink colours are transferred onto the plate cylinders, offset onto the rubber blanket, and back onto the newsprint—which spools off of giant rolls of paper at one end of the machine as it gets fed through the press units. Simultaneously, a rotating knife cuts the newsprint to size and layers the fresh pages on top of each other before the machine delicately and precisely folds the pages in half, then in half again (The Jasper Local is a 41 cm, “quarter-fold” tabloid). Thousands of “gripper fingers” on a winding, twisting conveyer chain snatch the freshly printed papers from the press folder and transport the newspapers to an adjacent mailroom where they get stacked, strapped and skidded, but before they get there, Dorie wants to make sure the print quality is as good as it can be. Plucking out a copy and inspecting it for smudges, colour inconsistencies or other irregularities, he’ll make micro adjustments on the press controls until the finished product is to a standard he’s comfortable with. In the meantime, the startup copies drop harmlessly into a recycling bin. For a typical run, about 400 copies get spoiled in the makeready process.

Minimizing waste is another central pillar in Great West’s corporate philosophy, van Huizen notes. That might sound suspicious coming from a plant that goes through four truckloads of newsprint per week, but van Huizen says Gazette Press receives its paper from Alberta Newsprint, in Whitecourt, a ForestCare-certified company which sources its pulp from off-cuts of the sawmill or lumber industry.

“It’s always nice to be able to say to readers of our newspapers that no trees have been cut down specifically to make the paper used to print their newspaper,” he said. “That’s contrary to what most people understand to be the case.”

As the first copies of the operator-approved Jasper Local spool around the final rollers on the press’ winding gripper chain, they get one last look by a crew member before they are packed into boxes to await a courier pick-up. The hyper-attention to detail may seem excessive, but it goes back to Great West’s core business: supporting journalism.

“If you don’t have a strong local journalism focus and hire good journalists, you’re not going to get people reading your paper. And if you don’t have people reading your paper, the advertising model doesn’t work in the long term.”

Bob Covey // https://bob@thejasperlocal.com