Page Title

Text Box: Our Times

Text Box: A Publication of the Boys and Girls Club of Freeport Sponsored by the Coalition for a Safe Community with funds provided by the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission and the Department of Human Services

Text Box: The Youth Media Task Force, Coalition For A Safe Community, took a trip to The Journal Standard in Freeport on Dec. 30, 2003. Those that attended include Natasha Phillips, Taller, Sahayyah Yates, and Charmaine Ferrell. Adult Advisors were Hannah Phillips, Todd McKenna and Jim Estes. Cindy Roblat, the newspaper NIE coordinator, was very helpful and showed us around. She told us that Freeport previously had a paper that came out in German once a week for the people who lived in Freeport and were German. Most of the articles were about baptisms, churches, and who was coming to town. They also put out a daily paper that was in English. You can see some of these old papers on microfilm at the library. Microfilm is a picture of a paper and it is shrunken down so that you can see all the old papers. We also learned some vocabulary like a cut line is the captions you see under the pictures. A mug shot is the little head shots that you see in articles or the pictures of the people that write the articles. And finally jumps are what tells you where to go when a story continues on another page. Newspapers there are kept for one year and can be purchased unless it is the last copy for that day. Graham explained to us what happened in the sports department. He said they usually work from noon to midnight. They have to pick what is important due to the lack of space. In the pre-press room, Cindy showed us the film that is used has holes on the top of the page to make sure that it is perfectly aligned. We then moved on to the press room where Delvin, with the help of Bryan and Jack, explained the process of printing. They start off by using plates, which have a finish on them, and then they lay the film on the plate. The plate is then laid on the ultralight machine which prints the film onto the plate and several plates are printed according to color. The plates are then put into the press. The press is able to print twenty-four full pages at one time. The plates can be recycled because they are made of aluminum and when they are recycled they are worth more than aluminum cans. Different presses have different colors, it then goes into a folder which cuts and folds the paper. They are able to print about 17,000 copies in one hour, and that is just the A and B sections. Three rolls are used to print the A and B section and only one roll is used for the C section. Paper rolls cost about $300 and weigh about 900 pounds each. The paper comes from either North Carolina or Canada. They use soy ink to print the papers. The press is run by vacuum and electric and uses ink and water to print. There is a total of 105 rollers in the entire press. (Continued on page 2)