SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Newspapers across the U.S. are cutting costs by outsourcing their printing. But one small town paper in upstate New York is still being printed locally. North Country Public Radio's Zach Jaworski takes us there.
ZACH JAWORSKI, BYLINE: Just about 5,000 people call New York's Saranac Lake home. The mountain village is also home to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, a local paper that has no plan to print anywhere but here.
AARON MARBONE: There's definitely a huge sense of pride with it.
JAWORSKI: Aaron Marbone is a senior reporter for the Enterprise.
MARBONE: It's not something essential for journalism, but it adds a lot to journalism.
JAWORSKI: This fall the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a regionally known outlet in Missouri, closed their press room in St. Louis, opting instead to print in Columbia, a city about two hours away. Dozens more make the same choice each year to cut printing costs. Marbone says keeping presses here is a tradition of sorts.
MARBONE: Having the press right here, finishing up the paper and then hearing the presses kick on - it's a great feeling.
JAWORSKI: He's working on stories that don't affect a lot of people - a small road closure due to an accident and a children's musical. But to Saranac Lake, those are really important. When Marbone's done writing, he signals his newsroom colleague, who lifts a bike horn from her desk.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIKE HORN HONKING)
JAWORSKI: Someone else puts their hands to their mouth and produces a loon call.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Imitating loon).
JAWORSKI: Those noises let Jesse Phelan, who's been a pressman at the paper for more than 16 years, know the paper is ready to print.
JESSE PHELAN: All right. So everything we do here starts with paper.
JAWORSKI: Today Phelan's walking me through the printing process, which starts out on a modern computer.
PHELAN: All right. So we are getting the files from our FTP site.
JAWORSKI: But after that, it doesn't look much different than it did 50 years ago.
PHELAN: You have to think of it in a different sense of - you're in a physical media format. Actually, analog is a better term.
JAWORSKI: The massive room we're in smells like hot oil mixed with pine, the type of tree the paper's made from. We're looking at around 50 feet of paper, bridging six refrigerator-sized printers. It looks kind of like a paper conveyor belt. These presses were made in the 1970s. And Phelan says they require a more hands-on approach than modern ones, which comes with more responsibility.
PHELAN: 'Cause you're running a machine that - if you make one wrong move and don't react quickly enough, you could destroy it in seconds.
JAWORSKI: Phelan wraps print rollers with aluminum templates of today's paper.
PHELAN: Now we apply the rest of the levers - ink levers, ink feeds, compression lever. Sometimes it takes a little finesse to get this to line up.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRINTING PRESS CLICKING)
PHELAN: There we go.
JAWORSKI: And through that process, which looks more like a choreographed dance than a skilled trade, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise is all set to print.
PHELAN: You're going to hear it for the first time.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)
JAWORSKI: One of the first people to read this edition - Dawn Reuter, a bartender at the nearby Rusty Nail.
DAWN REUTER: Everyone loves local news 'cause everyone that works at the paper knows everyone in town, so it's kind of a nice local community.
JAWORSKI: She says it wouldn't be the same if it was printed elsewhere.
REUTER: You know, everyone is wonderful at the paper, and the town enjoys having a local paper. It's something that people always grab. I pass it around every day at the bar.
JAWORSKI: As presses across the country continue to close, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise is proud to uphold a tradition. For NPR News, I'm Zach Jaworski in Saranac Lake, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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