After the newsroom's stories and articles are finished, (an average of 150,000 words daily), the paper is put together by a technologically-advanced method called pagination. A layout editor electronically "makes up" the page on the computer by accessing the stored news stories, and electronically adding headlines, photographs, captions, charts, graphs and advertisements to the page.

Once the page is made up, it is sent to the two printing plants via an advanced fiber optic transmission process using a telephone dataline. The transmission received in the plate-making room produces a page negative from which printing plates are made. The negative is placed on a photo-sensitive, aluminum plate and exposed to an ultra-violet light. The light changes the coating on the plate so that the exposed areas become receptive to ink. Ink will not adhere to the rest of the plate surface.

A press operator in the pressroom attaches the plate to a cylinder on the press. Once all plates have been placed on cylinders, press operators in a computerized control room start the press rolling.

When a press runs low on paper, it signals an automatically guided vehicle (AGV) to fetch a new roll. The battery-powered AGV follows low-power radio signals in the floor to the storage area, lifts a fresh roll of newsprint from its rack, returns to the press and slides it onto empty reel arms.

Each press prints, cuts, folds and assembles the papers. The presses that The Post began using last year produce about 60,000 newspapers per hour. During a typical night, eight presses print 800,000-900,000 newspapers in a four- to five-hour period of time. The newspapers are sent by conveyor to the mailroom, where they are automatically counted, bundled and dispatched for distribution.