Pressman Rick Fischer (featured first in the video) operates the printing press in the basement of the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin building on 415 N State Street–the same press that prints “The Weekly” each month. The machine prints copies of the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that are to be delivered the same afternoon. The printing press takes a couple of minutes to produce legible ink, so the first number of newspapers come out folded but ink-less, and so are recycled.  The rest are bound and delivered, just as the school’s newspapers are to 330 West Webster.

 

 

“The Weekly” is finally online, and with that comes a world of new possibilities for its writers and readers. But before we shift our attention to the podcasts, videos, and other media we can now use to enhance our stories, we should remember the gem of a printing press that has been putting out hard copies of “The Weekly” for over 20 years.

For those of you who thought the school’s fourth floor publishing office owned the machinery to print our paper, you were incorrect. In fact  the Law Bulletin Publishing Company, located on 415 N State Street in Chicago, prints and delivers 350 copies of “The Weekly” to the school 11 times a year.

Law Bulletin does more than print high school newspapers. Its main function is to print the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, a newspaper that covers news related to the court system, state government, and local government.  It has been publishing every Monday through Friday since 1854, missing only court holidays and the days when downtown Chicago burned with the great Chicago fire, according to the company’s folklore.

It is also one of the few papers remaining in Chicago, maybe in the entire country, that is printed in the afternoon. While wearing a burgundy button-down shirt, striped tie, and loafers revealing socks with a pizza pattern, Editor of the paper Marc Karlinsky said, “We are a holdout from that earlier era.”

Each reporter has a “beat,” which means they cover a specific area, Karlinsky explained. This could mean being stationed daily in Springfield, covering the capitol and anything coming out of the Illinois Supreme Court, or reporting on the federal courthouse downtown or the state court house at the Daley Center.

The process of creating their paper is similar to what Parker does but with a much faster production time. On a typical day, reporters send memos around 10 a.m. of what their stories will be about. They then go out into the field to do their fact-finding. Writers also need to tell the editors what they need to put in the paper that day, with a rough sense of how long an article will be and whether there will be photos of judges or lawyers to include.

The paper normally employs a staff of seven writers and some interns, but currently has five staff writers, no interns, and no assistant editors. “We’re always thin,” Karlinsky said, “but not this thin.”  

A minimum of two staff members other than the writer read over and edit each article. The mostly quiet office space, consisting of shoulder-high cubicles, is interrupted by the squeeks of rolly chairs and periodic yelling from opposite sides of the office—“1A is in layout!” or “1C is completed!” Articles are also reviewed by copy editor John Corcoran, who knows “more rules about writing,” Karlinsky said, “than any teacher who has ever ridiculed your grammar.”

At around 2:10, the voices get louder. People crowd around a central grey cabinet, pen in hand, to do proofs of printed articles. Karlinsky said, “Sometimes you catch things that you wouldn’t catch just reading it online.” The office communication turns into purposeful shouts.  

The final product is due to the printer at 2:30. “A reset button is hit at 3 p.m., and we start working on tomorrow’s paper,” Karlinsky said. “So it is a very quick turnaround.”

The actual printing press, located in the basement of the building, seems like a vestige from an earlier time. Several alternating turquoise and blue-grey machines make up the industrial printing presses. These line the back wall of a room about the size of a small gymnasium.  Classical music competes with the huffing of old machines and puffing of steam.

While new printing technology is available–machines that don’t require the meticulous turning of knobs and tugging on levers–these 40-year-old machines have been a “joy to operate,” according to pressman Rick Fischer who works in the company’s print production division. “Think of an old car that’s paid for,” Fischer said, “and just keeps on running.”

Between the time when writers put finishing touches on their work and a tangible paper is printed, is the “prepress” process. First, Karlinsky will send the finished document to an office on the ground floor where computer software correctly lines up pages so when they are folded and collated, they read as a logical double sided newspaper in a process called “imposition.”

The correctly imposed pages are transferred photographically to large, thin plates, printed by machines called plate makers. These plates have all of the text of the newspaper, but are colored in the negative. Essentially, the light spots on the plate collect ink and become dark spots in the newspaper as it rolls through the printing press. Anything that is light will hold ink transfer to the newspaper. All of the dark areas transfer as blanks on the newspaper.

One of the pressmen on the basement level will press the plates against a soft rubber cylinder, known as the blanket cylinder, and transfer the image across onto the sheets of newspaper.  

As the machine does its job, it takes a few seconds for the ink to start collecting on paper, so for the first 30 or 40 seconds of a print run, the papers come out folded nicely but completely blank or with illegible ink.  

Seventh grade English teacher Kate Tabor, one of “The Weekly”’s former faculty advisors, has only kind things to say about Parker’s relationship with the Law Bulletin. “They are kind of the perfect storm of incredibly responsive and incredibly affordable,” she said. “You can have something great, and fast, and you can have it cheap.”

Fortunately for Parker, it looks like the Law Bulletin will be around for years to come. Given that the paper includes the schedule of every court hearing in federal and state level courts every day, they are in the lucky position of having a captive audience. “If you are a trial lawyer, and you need to know when your case is coming up, or how far it is, this is the official thing,” Karlinksy said. “You can look online somewhere, but court rules tell people to check our paper.”

The fact that they have a specific audience, and no one else in town does what they do, is an advantage in the changing world of journalism, according to Karlinksy.  Nearly every law firm in Chicago receives the paper by 4 pm each day. This loyalty helps them stay on track in a world that has so many news sources.   

But while most of their readers depend on receiving a hard copy of the afternoon paper, it does not mean that they are not thinking about ways to innovate. The paper employs young and energetic reporters who are “just coming out of the gate and looking to prove themselves,” Karlinsky said.  One of these is digital editor Amanda Sims. “There is value in print media, she said. “But I think it is smart to take advantage of online. We live in such an immediate news world—we should adapt our strategy to most effectively use the tools we have.”