Alex Lloyd examines the production of the paper - and we offer you inside information about the regional press

ONCE the stories, images and advertising 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 image-setter 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.

In the press hall

he imaged' plate is sent to the press hall and placed on a plate bending machine.

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 together 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.

15 Things You Should Know About Local Newspapers

*There are 1,300 regional and local newspapers in the UK today. (Source: The Newspaper Society)*84 per cent of British adults read a regional newspaper, making it the most widely-read medium in the country. (BMRB/TGI 2002)*Almost 40 per cent of adults who read a regional newspaper do not read a national daily. (BMRB/TGI 2002)*The most popular newspaper topic is local news - 40 per cent of adults say this is a category they find "very interesting". (BMRB/TGI 2002)*On average, people spend 32 minutes reading a paid-for regional newspaper. (JICREG Dec 2002)*Some 4,067 local newspapers are sold in the UK every minute. (Source: ABC/Independent audits)*More than 41 million regional newspapers are sold, and 29 million distributed free, every week (Source ABC/VFD/Independent audits)*UK people spend more than £670 mil-lion each year on buying local papers (Source: Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2002)*There are over 600 regional newspaper websites (Source: The Newspaper Society)*There are around 100 regional press publishers in the UK, half of whom own just one local paper (Source: The News-paper Society)*One in five adults wouldn't be without their local newspaper. (Source: Con-sumer's Choice IV 2000)*Regional press is considered by the UK population to be the most trustworthy of all media (24 per cent), followed by BBC TV (18 per cent). (Source: Consumer's Choice IV 2000)*Regional press is considered to be the most enjoyable medium - 43 per cent of UK adults rated it the most enjoyable, compared to 35 per cent for national press and 34 per cent for BBC TV (Source: Consumer's Choice IV 2000)*68 per cent of Britain's influential business community reads a local newspaper. (Business Choice, 2000)*Nine out of ten advertising campaigns in the regional and local press work. (Conversion Study, conducted by Millward Brown)