| The following sequence illustrates the hectic and varied life inside a newspaper. When the reader picks it up in the morning it has been through a fast paced and complex 24-hour life cycle from the capture of breaking news to the reporting, printing and distribution of it. |
7.30am: A new day The Age’s front page has strong headlines, eye-catching colour pictures and stories with impact. The newspaper that readers see in the morning is the culmination of hundreds of people’s work from the previous 24 hours. More than one million copies of The Age are on the newsstands and heading for subscribers by 5.30am through the business week. On weekends, 315,000 copies of the The Saturday Age and 200,000 copies of the The Sunday Age hit the shops or are home delivered.
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8.30am: The news desk is a hub of action Many of the editors have already spent two hours reading papers and listening to television and radio news before arriving at the office. The chief of staff, state and national news editors scour the wire services to gauge the day’s unfolding events. Then they compile news lists of the events they think The Age should cover. Meanwhile, editorial and pictorial assistants have begun trawling through the numerous media releases and emails received during the night. The information is entered into the daily and weekly diaries, and distributed to various editors and rounds reporters for follow-up.
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9.30am: Morning news conference Armed with lists of the day’s emerging news, senior editors from the State, National, Business, Sport, Pictorial and Online sections come together with The Age’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, and managing editor Simon Mann to discuss potential news stories they want covered, the angles such stories might take, and the sort of pictures they’ll need to complement those articles. The news list often changes throughout the day, but the morning news conference provides a starting point for direction of the next day’s paper.
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10.30am: The ad book is prepared Newspapers generate revenue from advertising. Each day, once the advertising deadline is closed, display ads are assigned to pages, dictating the size of the newspaper. The Age uses a ratio of editorial to advertising space so that pages are balanced to meet the needs of readers and advertisers. A blueprint of the booked advertising space, called the “ad book”, is prepared in the morning to let editors know what space they have to run stories. News stories, their pictures and headlines are laid out each day around the advertisements. |
11.30am: Leader writers’ conference Every day The Age takes an editorial stance on important public issues such as politics, health, economics, education, society and culture. A pool of senior journalists called “leader writers” meet daily with The Age’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, to discuss matters the paper should comment on: what topics should be covered and what view The Age should take. Comments are published as the following day’s editorial opinion.
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1pm: Journalists at work The Age has more than 250 journalists who work throughout the day to cover stories for the paper. Depending on the stories they’ve been assigned they attend press conferences, monitor court proceedings and conduct interviews. The Age also has foreign correspondents working in China, Japan, Indonesia, United States and Britain. As big stories break in other parts of the world, The Age will sometimes send journalists to those locations too.
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4pm: Afternoon news conference This is the critical meeting of the day where the day’s news events are evaluated for position, space and priority in the paper. Editors discuss the stories reporters are working on and make assessments of accompanying photographs and illustrations. Stories are assigned to pages. |
6pm: Night staff take over Once a page list has been compiled, and the page one news conference is over, the night editor begins laying out the news pages which copy editors then fill with the assigned stories. By 7.30pm, work on most of the stories to be included in the first edition of The Age is nearing completion. |
9.30pm: The Age is prepared for printing Pages of the newspaper are sent electronically from The Age building at Spencer Street, where The Age editorial staff have spent the day constructing the newspaper, to The Age Print Centre at Tullamarine. A laser is used to transfer each page to aluminium plates. The aluminium plates are then bent and fitted to the cylinders on the printing towers. In a process known as off-set printing, the plates roll onto a rubber blanket, which then presses the image directly to the paper. |
10pm - 3am: The newspaper is printed, cut, folded and loaded into trucks When the pages are printed, the sheets are sliced and folded. Through an automated conveyor system, the papers are bundled, labelled, wrapped and transported to loading bays. The first edition truck leaves Tullamarine for country areas of Victoria at about 10.15pm. Printing presses begin printing the second edition of The Age at about 11pm and the third edition at about 1am. |
3am: distribution The massive distribution process has already begun, and waiting trucks pick up the second edition of the paper. The Age is sent to homes, newsagents, and other outlets around the country. |
7am: In the hands of the reader The process starts all over again, as a reader reads the paper over breakfast. |
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