Ah, the newspaper Mail room/Press room operators (a slowly dying profession).

I started this topic after looking at some of the various postings by other writers with regards to other occupations, and figured that it might be interesting to give as well as get some unique perspective from those that actually work in newspaper press rooms and mail rooms, as I do.

I think that, for all intents and purposes, it ought to be mentioned that, working in a mail room at a newspaper is not like what people might imagine, its actually more like being an active part in the middle of a fairly complex, yet delicate orchestration of hand tuned machinery and newspaper inserts in motion. As anybody else that also works in a mail room at a paper can attest to, no 2 nights are the same, and very rarely do things ever actually run completely as expected, and there is always suspense as well as action going on in a mail room during a press run.

Now, first of all, I work as a mail room operator at the Times Record News, which is the main newspaper in Wichita Falls and runs off nightly from the press. We do many different things from running packages for the weekend papers to the actual press runs that probably work differently to some degree of that which much larger and more modernized newspaper mail rooms have, like the Houston Chronicle, or the Dallas Morning News. However, the general principle remains the same as far as what needs to be done, the insert machinery (ours is considerably older and much more mechanical than most papers) and just about everything else in between.

Our nightly paper circulation is at roughly 30,000 per night, we run 2 of the oldest Harris/Sheridan insert machines still in use by any newspaper that I have heard of or seen, in fact, they are so old, that everything is completely tuned by hand using wrenches, T-handles for gear timings on the stations, etc. air hoses and vacuum hoses run amuck to every station, they certainly are rather interesting pieces of machinery to watch in motion considering how much is being run though them at once during a press run.

Typically, the newspaper (which we call a "header") is setup on the first station at the start of each machine, then all of the inserts are setup and tuned into each subsequent station following the "header". As the first headers are fed into the pockets of the machine, the person running this station holds down a green button on a lighted control panel and the machine begins to

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