This week the Evening Press is helping mark Local Newspaper Week with a series of features about our business. Today Alex Lloyd examines the production of the paper.

ONCE the stories, images and advertis-ing have been gathered for the Evening Press, its pages need to be prepared and printed.

Jon Kirkman, Planning and Output Manager, uses guidelines to plan the lay-out based on the adverts booked in, calculating the number of pages required and where there should be colour.

When Jon and the Editor are happy with the plan, the pages are made up by the planning and output team, who place all the adverts and datelines onto each page before releasing them to the newspaper's sub-editors, who put them together with the editorial content - stories, pictures and graphics.

The finished pages are proofed by the output team's product controller and sent to the camera room where an im-agesetter machine converts a digital signal into a negative image of each page.

This is checked for visual errors and placed on a aluminium printing plate and exposed to ultra violet light.

The 'imaged' plate is sent to the press hall and placed on a plate bending ma-chine.

The newspaper press has a number of printing units which are able to print on both sides of the paper at the same time, some in colour.

The paper is drawn through reelstands in the floor below the press.

After going through the printing units the paper is gathered and fed into the folder/cutter which puts the pages to-gether as a complete newspaper.

The press can produce more than 30,000 copies of the paper each hour and is in operation almost constantly under the command of Dave Gibson, Head of Operations, and his team.

Updated: 09:18 Wednesday, May 07, 2003