Gallery: From Production to Press
The Gardena Valley News office resides in an apartment building on Vermont Avenue. The Daily Bruin is the last paper of the day to be printed at this press.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
Maria Vasquez receives the final document from Daily Bruin's Copy section around 1:00 a.m. and checks for layout errors before processing the design for the printer. Before the printing can commence, Vasquez fine-tunes every minute detail from color composition to font compatibility.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Once the layout is perfected, the paper is sent to a laser printer that engraves an outline of each page onto a separate metal plate. These plates are later used as templates for printing.
(Liz Ketcham/Daily Bruin)
Carlos Bueno, the plant manager, oversees the printing process once the plates are created.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
Before printing begins, paper makes its way through the printer to test out the colors.
(Liz Ketcham/Daily Bruin)
While the printing press fires up, press operator Manuel Tahay waits on standby to adjust ink levels.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Referencing a draft print, Hugo Urizar moves the registration on the tower to line up the cyan, magenta, yellow and black layers of each photo.
(Niveda Tennety/Daily Bruin)
Most workers use hearing protection to shield them from the loud machinery that runs for over an hour. Mechanical noise in printing presses can reach over 85 decibels, which is about as loud as a hair dryer.
(Niveda Tennety/Daily Bruin)
Buckets of fresh ink are placed in the warehouse, ready for use.
(Niveda Tennety/Daily Bruin)
Each ink tower is equipped to print one color: cyan, magenta, yellow or black. The colors print in layers and are overlaid on top of each other to create the final print product.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
The printer spans the entire length of the warehouse and is comprised of several machines working in tandem. Press workers walk to and from machinery and work stations, bundling papers as they are expelled from the machine.
(Liz Ketcham/Daily Bruin)
As printing continues, slight adjustments are made to the ink mixes to ensure color accuracy, referencing a monitor with the print layout.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
This machine manipulates levels of ink and has been adjusted for the paper being printed. The pigment sticks to machinery, staining it blue.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Once the process has been perfected for the night, the newsprint moves quickly through the printer, taking about an hour and a half to complete all of the papers.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
At the end of the printing track, a machine folds papers in half and puts them on a conveyor belt for collection.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Workers prepare folded papers for delivery, checking to see if pages are in order and counting bundles to ensure proper quantity.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Maria Luisa manually slots ad inserts into the paper. The inserts are sent to the printing press beforehand.
(Tanmay Shankar/Daily Bruin)
Once they are bundled and inserted, the papers are stacked on a forklift, ready to be loaded into the delivery van.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
After all of the papers are loaded, delivery drivers bring them to UCLA newsstands by 7 a.m.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
At the end of the production-to-press process, readers can pick up a paper at a newsstand on campus.
(Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)
