NewsBeat

June 2019 NewsBeat 13 he newspaper is a veritable helper, with many functions in the course of the day. It wakes you in the morning, tells you things on the way to work, comes to hand when you have 10 minutes to spare or need to clear your head, sits with you during your solo lunch, ladles out the soothing stuff you've kept for the ride home. It can serve as a veil when you're at a cafe terrace and wish to avoid attention, as a fan when you're relaxing in the park on a hot day, as a pillow when you consequently cop a snooze, as a cushion for transporting pottery or glassware, as a fire starter for the hearth, as a floor covering when painting or sanding, as a liner for your cockatoo's cage. Oddly enough, newspapers also come in handy when you are being stalked by paparazzi. Stars, crooks and indicted officials seem to have lately overlooked this handy source of portable foliage. But fame is ever fleeting in the world of news. In the 1937 comedy "Nothing Sacred," Carole Lombard plays a young woman apparently dying of a rare disease. Just before we find out she really isn't, the camera lingers for a moment on the front page of some gazette, on which appears an overripe ode to her courage — and then a fish lands on top and hands wrap it up. These are perilous times for newspapers, which all across the nation are being bought up by speculators and stripped for parts, from major papers in secondary markets to small- town bugles that sometimes have survived for a century or more. Their reportorial and editorial staffs are drastically cut, their page counts decreased, the local interest and focus that once lay at their hearts yanked in favor of wire-service summaries of national news already being covered much better everywhere else. Sometimes these papers are taken online altogether, where with their minimized resources they can be mistaken for URL place holders or the output of Romanian troll farms. For a paper to lose its print edition is to become ghostlike, immaterial. There are plenty of fine online periodicals, of course, but those were designed with the logic of the internet in mind. The local paper, on the other hand, was meant to draw a picture of a physical community, with its customs, rituals, manners, lingo and collective memory inscribed in a thousand minute ways. Even if you get it only for the yard-sale ads or to hate-read the letters column, its presence itself is reassuring, part of the sometimes thin fabric that holds you and your neighbors together. But if you can't buy it at the gas station along with your six pack and your night crawlers, it might as well not exist. Nevertheless, even as the physical newspaper is diminished in numbers, it bows to no product in the modernity and total awesomeness of its production. As these spectacular photos by Christopher Payne show, The New York Times is produced in College Point, Queens, on machines the size of large houses, which do everything from the unwinding of the paper rolls to the folding of the complete sections. Each tower prints 28 spreads at once, front and back, in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, at ridiculous speed — 80,000 copies an hour can be produced this way. And then you can hold it in your hand, fold it, tear it, use it as a rain hat — a voluminous paper object with visual dazzle and hundreds of thousands of words, representing the collected information of that moment: news, opinion, analysis, testimony, critique, charts, graphs, photos, displays. And it happens every day, over and over again. Small wonder they call it The Daily Miracle. — Luc Sante Luc Sante is a writer and critic. His books include "Low Life," "Kill All Your Darlings" and "The Other Paris." Newspapers bow to no product in the modernity and awesomeness of their production The photographer Christopher Payne spent two years shooting The Times's printing plant in College Point, Queens. He captured the craft, precision, and unexpected beauty of the newspaper printing process. T

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