The end of an era as Tampa Bay Times plant prints its final papers [View all]

ST. PETERSBURG — An old analog clock, hung crooked over the rolls of newsprint, let the night’s sparse crew know they had time yet until deadline. On a Saturday night, nearing 8 o’clock, it was still quiet in the reel room, beneath the dormant presses.

Ladda Peterson laid a pattern of red tape on the blank, white bales, setting them up for an unbroken scroll. The halls were hollow as staffers burned vacation time, but like everybody still here, she was used to making do with less. As always, the press crew was ready: “Bombs” of ink, thick and pungent as classroom paint, were hooked up. Ribbons of paper were strung along rollers. And the next day’s pages were beginning to arrive.

What starts in spiral notebooks has for six decades come here, to the Tampa Bay Times’ printing plant, to be stamped into something you can hold. Phone calls and tips turned into stories, the first drafts of the first draft of history — those get combed over and neatened on digital pages. In a dizzying overnight transformation, stories end up folded on front yards before early light.

About 9 p.m., in a room as bright as airport security, machines hissed and burned Sunday’s pages into perfect stamps. Headlines appeared ghostlike on anodized aluminum plates. Each is designed to snap onto cylinders, so ink can press onto rubber and rubber onto newsprint, just so.

Read more: https://www.tampabay.com/narratives/2021/03/03/the-end-of-an-era-as-tampa-bay-times-plant-prints-its-final-papers/