Our field trip to the Morning Call!

We had so much fun yesterday . . . we went to our local newspaper for a "behind-the-scenes" tour of how they make the newspaper that we get on Sundays -- and yes, they print newspapers every day, but we only get the Sunday paper because it's the only day we have time to read it ;)

In the lobby of the Morning Call . . .

eagerly anticipating the start of our tour!

We began our tour looking at an old printing press. We could see where they would set the type to print the paper. Pictured along with Daddy and the kids is "Mr. Bob" -- our wonderful tour guide and member of our church.

This room was filled with rolls of paper stacked up to the ceiling! Each roll of paper weighs about 1800 pounds (or -- as my husband told the kids -- about 9 daddies)!

This room is where the paper is fed up to the actual printing room, which is on the floor above. These machines are set up so that the paper can be continually fed without having to stop printing to change rolls of paper. Depending on the length of a particular day's paper, they can go through 9 or 10 rolls of paper to print one day's newspapers.

These are the actual presses where the printing happens . . .

. . . and a section of the paper is being printed.

The press prints the paper, splits the page in half, folds and assembles each section. It was pretty cool watching the finished section fly off the assembly line! (No idea what section it was, though, because it was moving so fast.)

Here the finished sections hang from a conveyor belt and travel to the next room.
In this room, different sections are assembled and "stuffed" -- for example, the comics section (which is Lael's favorite) gets stuffed with coupons and sales flyers. Each section gets stuffed only with the sales flyers for stores in that region.

This is the assembly line that is stuffing the comic section for next Sunday's paper.

Wow, what a fun trip! Lael was excited to sneak a peek at the comics for next Sunday, while Jaden loved all the noisy machines (and the ear plugs he got to wear while we were in those rooms). Thank you so much to "Mr. Bob" for arranging this wonderful tour for us! Now the kids have decided that we should write our own newspaper -- so stay tuned to see what happens with that!