Last week we gave readers a headsup to look for a revamp of physical features— sheet size, color pages, and one I didn’t mention: where the susbcriber address goes. These are the result of making a change in printing operations, a major undertaking for weeklies like this one.
Newsprint paper—and the giant presses that print on it—comes in a confusing array of sizes, from the single sheets that were printed on many 19th- and early 20th-century models the size of a Volkswagen, to the enormous rolls fed into the house-sized, multi-color presses that now handle the majority of dailies.
To shift our operations a bit closer to home and save on time and fuel costs, we’re now using the facilities of the Lubbock- based West Texas Printing Center, which occupies a plant the size of a college basketball gym. It has meant saying a fond good-bye to our intrepid craftsmen at Community Printers of Shamrock, one of those shops that keeps a large-format web sheet rolling week in, week out with only a small crew.
You’d think our news, smaller sheet size means less room for news, photos and ads. But here’s the thing: newspapers (or magazines, for that matter) measure their ad space in column inches, a specification that varies with the paper size. We’re still a six-column paper, and each page will still provide 126 column inches of usable space. Some ads will be a bit smaller, though some will actually run larger. Bear with us over the coming weeks as we redesign advertisements bit by bit.
To achieve the best cost-effectiveness on Lubbock’s giant press, we can actually print 12 pages of content for less than 10. And we’ll have color on every page that is actually a folded multiple of the larger sheet.
Don’t try to figure that out. Just enjoy the additional pages of regional stories, the crossword puzzle every week, and the greater number and/ or larger size of photos! For home subscribers, your address label will appear on the lower right side of the page. We hope that won’t make much difference to you Pick up your morning coffee cup—you should find it a little easier to open up the paper while you drink it. But you may need to add a few minutes to your reading time. We hope we’ll make it worth your while.
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