Thomas Curwen is one of those newspaper veterans who has done it all. During his 40-year career at the Los Angeles Times, he’s served as an outdoors editor, a Book Review editor and a features editor. He’s done news stories big and small, and was on the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of a terrorist attack. He has a literature major’s passion for narrative nonfiction, which shows in bylined work that has been recognized with everything from the 2020 Meyer Berger Award to a being named a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer in feature writing for a reconstruction of a grizzly attack in Montana. He’s worked through the technological and economic ups and downs of the newspaper industry — most of it with the presses of the L.A. Times serving as his soundtrack.
So when contractions in the news industry reached those presses, Curwen made sure that the end of one more chapter in newspaper history didn’t go unnoticed.
Times owners announced in late 2022 that they would be closing the company’s historic Olympic printing plant — a facility that cost $230 million when it opened and had been a state-of-the-art billboard for the then-burgeoning newspaper industry. Two weeks before the plant’s last run in March 2024, Curwen reported beyond a predictable business story to produce a eulogy for a stalwart colleague. “Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time” celebrated the plant’s history, saluted its proud, exacting workers and elegantly marked a high point in the fading industry of print.
His piece was something of a sequel to a piece he had written six years earlier, when the Times left its offices in downtown Los Angeles. “These historic moves were the result of business decisions made by the previous owner, Tribune Publishing, which, in its misguided and elusive quest to be profitable, sold its real estate holding, making the Times a tenant in the buildings it had once owned,” Curwen told me. “A story chronicling this latest chapter seemed only natural.”
To do that, he followed the press crew through a Friday swing shift — its last. He avoids clichéd nostalgia by building his story on facts: Readers learn, among other things, about how many gallons the facility’s fire-suppression tank held. He draws on terminology such as “ink density,” elicits quotes that reflect the workers’ pride and professionalism (“When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed”), and traces the arc of the facility’s history with a verve that could enthrall even casual readers.
But his writing lends it an aching tone that reflects a care for quality of his craft as deep as the press operators for theirs.
“This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts,” Curwen told me.
He answered Storyboard’s questions about how he conveyed the character of a building and machines, and annotated his piece to describe his reporting and writing decisions. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Before we get to the annotation, can you give us an overview of your reporting and writing for this piece?.
My reporting began with an impromptu visit to the plant in early February. Over my years at the Times, I would often drop in to pick up extra copies of various editions of the paper, so I was very familiar with the plant. I had once regularly used its gym and ate occasionally in its cafeteria.
After poking around on my own one afternoon, I began to make a few phone calls and started digging through old company newsletters. Through that, I was able to lay down a chronology of the plant’s early years and pick up memories from the people who worked there. All were eager to reminisce; their connection to this place was palpable.
Eventually I met up with Kal Hamalainen, the pressroom shift supervisor, who was critical in helping me work out how I was going to report the story. My editor and I had decided that we wanted to catch one of the last press runs, and we wanted to make sure it was a busy run. A Friday night — the last Friday night run there for the Times — fit the bill.
But first, I wanted to get the lay of the land. Often in reporting these stories, I feel like a deer in the headlights; with so much information coming at me, I like to try to slow down the reporting so I can see and think and process all that I’m learning. So I went on an escorted tour to get the big picture and help me organize my thoughts for the Friday night reporting.
When that Friday came around, I was ready. I showed up at the start of the swing shift and stayed past its end. With those 10 hours in my notebook, I had the backbone of my story. It was then a question of weaving in the various details: history, memories and general color.
Whom did you work with during the editing process, and how much was the story shaped during that stage?
I worked with my editor on the Metro desk, Cindy Chang, and with Column One editor Steve Padilla. The edits were fairly simple. I had wanted to hold off explaining the reason for the closure in order to capture more of the bittersweetness of the moment in the lede. But they wanted to bring that explanation closer to the top, so we did a little rearranging.
The day-in-the-life format is, in my mind, an easy way to organize the story because it follows a basic chronology. It answers a lot of questions that might otherwise get raised over how to shape the story.
One thing that stands out about the story is an elegiac tone. How cognizant were you, if at all, of setting a particular mood in this piece?
I like that: elegiac. Yes, that certainly was the feeling, and I work pretty hard to try and capture that feeling.
A few years back, I wrote for Storyboard an appreciation of Michael Paterniti’s “Long Fall of 111 Heavy.” That piece — especially its opening— is so powerful for bringing the melody of words into the service of meaning. This is what I aspire toward: to find the rhythm and pacing of language that captures the emotion of the moment as well as the facts. It takes a lot of reading out loud, and a willingness to play around with language in the course of revision.
Is there anything that informed or inspired your writing for this piece, such as other journalism you’ve written or read, or any pieces of fiction?
I read writers who seem to have the same goals and intention. The list is long — and readers of Storyboard will know many of them. Narratives are, in my mind, the gold standard when it comes to drawing in readers and not letting them go until the last word. That’s the real challenge, isn’t it? In this distracted age, getting readers’ attention and ensuring a good payoff at the end.
I also read fiction and poetry, especially poets who have a story to tell.
I like writers who are playful and idiosyncratic in their use of language and story structure. I’m currently reading Richard Powers’ “Playground.” So far, as a fan of his “The Overstory,” I’m not disappointed.
Did you learn anything during any part of creating this story that you’ll carry into future stories, or that may be of use to other journalists?
It’s a good question. I’ve read a lot of writing books, taken a lot of writing classes, spoken to other writers — both journalists and otherwise. I wish there were clear lessons that applied to the next story. But each story is sui generis; each requires its own problem-solving.
I’ll always remember what the wonderful writer and editor for The New Yorker, William Maxwell, said when asked if writing ever got easier. He was, at the time, in his late 70s and explained that every story is new to him, that every story raises questions that he had never considered before, and answering those questions required a different approach. I took heart that so experienced a writer felt that good writing never gets easier.
And of course, that is the joy of this occupation. There are a few tricks that help move the process along — the day-in-the-life approach, for instance— but having done this for a few years, my best advice for other writers is to be patient with the process and understand that frustration (Oh, that shitty first draft!) is normal. You will be discouraged, and you just might want to give up. But you won’t. Good storytelling takes time, and you have to have the faith that with time, you will write the story that you want.
ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Curwen’s answers in blue.
Storied presses print L.A. Times for the last time as production moves to Riverside
By Thomas Curwen
Staff Writer
Photography by Genaro Molina
March 10, 2024
The swing shift is about to start at a plant that is about to close. There’s a pleasing repetition of “about to” in this sentence. Do you recall how you ended up crafting this opening sentence? I think a lot about first sentences. I rehearse them while driving in my car. I rehearse them lying in bed at night. I rehearse them in the shower. I need to feel the music of the words, and when this opening came to me, it sounded just right. It’s a kind of iambic pentameter (“So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” as we’re taught), and yes, I love the repetition of the “about to,” especially as it captures both the start and the close. The alpha and the omega. Late winter sunlight casts long shadows from workers crossing the parking lot, where stray cats skulk among the cars.
Only two weeks left, and the routine is unchanged: clocking in at 5 p.m., heading to the locker room, trading street clothes for work wear. If anyone feels sadness or loss, no one shows it. They have a newspaper to put out. This lede evokes a sense of stoicism and hard work on the part of the press crew. How did you decide to start the story with that tone?I really enjoy writing color. If I can nail a descriptive passage early on, then I can establish a rhythm that will help me continue with the writing. My first draft is often overwritten, which I will pare down in successive versions.
I’m also mindful of pacing. I want to keep readers off guard by mixing the exposition with both long sentences, which capture a mood or give them something to think about, and short sentences, delivered in fast clip. If I can offer a quick recitation of facts that way, all the better. “We’re trying to do this with a little class and dignity,” said shift supervisor Kal Hamalainen.
Sixteen months ago, they were told that the Los Angeles Times, their employer, would outsource the printing of the paper and that the Olympic printing plant, once a crown jewel in a vast media empire, would shut down sometime in 2024.
The decision was set in motion many years earlier when the Chicago-based Tribune Co., then owner of The Times, sold its historic properties, and The Times became a tenant.
Now, six years after Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought The Times in 2018, the lease on the Olympic plant is expiring, and paying rent has become untenable. The paper will be printed in Riverside by the Southern California Newspaper Group, with its circulation numbers remaining the same.
“Technology and economics have changed dramatically, and we’re transitioning to a new era for our business,” Times President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Argentieri said in a statement, citing both the daily newspaper and digital platforms.
March 10 will be the last run of The Times at the Olympic plant. You pack quite a bit of exposition into these few paragraphs: several owners, the information on the new printing location, the key detail on the unchanged circulation. How much thought went into how much to keep and how much to leave out in this portion? It’s always a question of balance, and in this instance, I needed to answer a basic question from readers who might assume that the print edition of the Times was permanently going away. But there was another opportunity here as well. By highlighting the unsentimental, almost bureaucratic details for the closure, I could set up a contrast within the story with the people whose lives were so affected by this decision, the heart and soul of the plant.
Dressed in blue pants and blue shirts with a Times eagle patch, the workers find their places throughout the sprawling facility. Each is a crucial link in a chain of production often called the daily miracle: that alchemical transformation of words and pictures into a newspaper to be held, sold, mailed or tossed onto any driveway, any doorstep in the city. This may be too specific a question but I can’t resist it: You don’t often run into the word “alchemical” in the newspaper. Do you recall how you chose that adjective to describe the making of the daily paper? I love this question. OK, so yes, I’m an English major, and yes, I’ve read a lot of poetry. Do you remember the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? The opening is unforgettable.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table …
It’s that image in the third line. And it’s that word, “etherized,” that has stayed with me since I first read that poem.
So, if possible, I want to find an unusual image — or an unusual word — that readers might hold onto and remember long after finishing the piece. My goal is to write a story that doesn’t get lost in the incessant churn of daily journalism. I want readers to remember these stories well beyond the moment when they read them.
What once was so easy to take for granted has never seemed so remarkable.
They have watched as their crews have been cut, three shifts reduced to one. They once printed other papers besides The Times, and those have gone elsewhere. But it’s hard to be nostalgic over what seems inevitable.
Newspapers have suffered many depredations over the years, from the internet to cost-cutting shareholders to skepticism and disinterest in the written word. With print readership declining in most markets, many media outlets are publishing stories online before printing them. The Times is following this trend, though it consistently ranks among the six largest newspapers in the country for print circulation.
But that’s another story. On this Friday night, Feb. 23, what’s more important is a Ukrainian woman’s search for her husband, a jury’s verdict in a hit-and-run, and in sports, a profile of UCLA’s mercurial basketball coach, as well as the obituaries, comics and horoscopes. At what point did you decide to include a “snapshot” of that particular day’s stories? What purpose does it serve? I like toggling back and forth between the Big Picture (“Newspapers have suffered many depredations…”) and the Little Picture (“obituaries, comics and horoscopes”). I think it’s fun, but it is also a reminder why a newspaper is such a brilliant invention for capturing not only the intensity of everyday life but also the beauty of its more mundane moments.
Press operators gather to review the run: Tomorrow’s paper will have color on all but one of the 22 pages. They’ll start at 8:30, print a little more than 100,000 copies and be done in less than two hours.
To step inside the Olympic printing plant is to step inside a time capsule enshrining a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence. This may be my favorite sentence, which is both an accurate summation of the newspaper industry in three combinations of adjectives and nouns. What do you recall about writing it? Walking through the plant, I couldn’t help but feel the breadth of time— almost three centuries — that a newspaper covers. You feel it as you walk beneath the huge presses, mindful of not brushing up against the ink-splattered drums, then you hold a freshly printed copy in your hands and see the pallets being loaded on trucks. And to think: those stories that are being delivered in such an antiquated way are also being read on phones.
Whenever I finish reporting in the field, I sit down at my keyboard and I type my notes, scribbled in a reporter’s notebook. As I hammer away— yes, it can be very tedious— I have a blank document on the side and into that, goes the fun stuff: a few sentences at a time, riffs on what I saw and heard and felt. I’m a big fan of free writing for bringing out fresh language and ideas.
That was the origin of that sentence: a little bit of free writing from my notes, letting my imagination play around with what I saw.
Within these walls was the future of Los Angeles and Southern California, as once imagined by the owners of The Times. Fueled by a diverse economy — a dividend of the postwar boom years — this building, likened by one manager to the Taj Mahal, was dedicated on March 6, 1990. (The paper had been printed on the company’s aged presses in the basement of its headquarters downtown.)
“This was to be a model for the world, not just Southern California,” said Tom Johnson, 82, publisher from 1980 to 1989. Did you speak to Tom Johnson, or was this quote archival? In 2018 when the Times left Times Mirror Square, I spoke to Tom Johnson for his memories of that building, and when I started this story, I called him back. Six years later, he’s still in Atlanta and still happy to talk about the time when he was the paper’s publisher.
It cost $230 million, the lion’s share of a nearly half-billion-dollar expenditure that saw the construction of a printing plant in Chatsworth and the renovation of an existing production facility in Costa Mesa. Those were halcyon days for The Times, whose parent corporation, Times Mirror, posted more than $3.7 billion in revenue in 1991.
“Come visit the 21st century,” Times readers were encouraged in an advertisement inviting them to tour the new Olympic plant. This detail captures the innovation and optimism of that era in newspapers. How did you dig up the advertisement?I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to weaving in historical details, especially if I can use the exact language from the time and moment. So if I see an opportunity, I’ll take it. I don’t quite recall where this came from, and it might have been from a source. That’s the measure of the love and appreciation that employees, past and present, at the Times have felt toward the newspaper. They save everything from past editions of paper to commemorative swag. Plus, the Times has a wonderful historian, Darrell Kunitomi, and librarian, Cary Schneider, both of whom are indispensable in finding keys to our past. This quote, by the way, certainly helped me with that previous sentence (“… a 19th century product manufactured with 20th century technology and poised for 21st century obsolescence”).
Its story was told by numbers: a 26-acre site; a 684,491-square-foot building; six presses capable of printing 70,000 96-page papers per hour; a 400,000-gallon underground water tank for fire suppression; six 6,200-gallon tanks of color ink; a warehouse capable of holding a 65-day supply of paper; and a 148-seat cafeteria for nearly 500 employees. One thing I like about this story is how you’re able to smuggle so much background and context into something that really is a wistful feature. What do you think the effect of telling readers straightaway about all the numbers coming at them in this graf? It’s a good question, and I often debate the value of numbers. Few readers will remember any of this, but what they might walk away with is the feeling — the sense that in aggregate this is one big facility, nothing puny about it. I also remember back in the day when we’d produce graphics that told stories “by the numbers,” so I suspect that was an influence as well. I also really like lists. I like how they manage to tell a big story through a lot of small details, covering a lot of ground in a fairly succinct way and letting readers draw their own conclusion; showing not telling.
Beyond the numbers was the Jetsons quality of the place.
Robotic vehicles delivered rolls of paper from the warehouse to machines that fed the presses. Doors opened at the push of a button. Conveyors whisked printed papers to automated bundlers and then to awaiting pallets, hands free. And then you transition into a whiz-bang description of the then-futuristic presses. How deliberate were you in transitioning from the previous grafts — with all the numbers — into these? I’m glad you picked up on this. It is again part of that broader theme (a 19th century product … 21st century obsolescence). I found something both epic and old-world in the building itself, which those numbers convey. But then how can you not be amazed by the futuristic automation of the place? It’s this contrast that I found especially intriguing, and I often find if I can convey my own sense of wonder, then readers will pick up on it as well.
At the center of it all were the six presses, three on one side and three on the other, running almost two football fields long, connected by a nearly soundproof room with windows angling overhead, providing press operators with easy line of sight and silent escape from the incessant 100-decibel thrum.
The lobby, as elegant as an art museum, was finished in marble and hardwood and featured a glass wall, three stories tall, overlooking the presses that receded far in the distance. In the floor lay a time capsule, a measure of the owner’s faith in the future, to be opened on the paper’s bicentennial: Dec. 4, 2081. What’s happening with the time capsule? I found the time capsule to be one of the more poignant details, and when I included it, I wondered if it spoke for itself or whether it needed a little interpretation. I decided to let it be, hoping that readers would be struck by the confidence (hubris?) of the paper’s owners at a time when the future seemed so assured: that the paper would be printed in 2081, that the company would remain unchanged, that the building still belonging to the LA Times.
I’m reminded of line from the poem “Ozymandias”: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
I believe the time capsule was recently retrieved by the owner of the Times and will eventually find its place in a museum that is under construction next to the Times’ building in El Segundo.
Bob Lampher came to work at the Olympic plant in 1989 as the presses were being installed. He had started at the Times 22 years earlier, “a dream job” after working the presses for the Anaheim Bulletin, the Downey Southeast News and the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot.
“Oly” — as the plant was known — “was the most modern pressroom around,” said Lampher, 82, a retired superintendent. “When I first got here, my jaw dropped. It was simply beautiful, and I thought it would run forever.” You don’t have a lot of quotes in this story, but the ones you have are impactful. How did you decide who to speak to for this story? Did anything surprise you about what was said?It’s an interesting observation. My sources talk to me a lot (motivated no doubt by all my questions). But much of what they tell me is informational and I often find that can be rewritten in a more compelling, quicker manner. Also, as we all know, some sources are very quotable and others not so much. So as I’m taking notes, I’m pretty attuned to the quote that will lift off the page.
Many years ago, I wrote a piece that had no direct quotes, and I really like the effect.
The assumption is forgivable. The Times’ weekday circulation — spread among the Olympic plant, as well as Orange County and the San Fernando Valley printing facilities — was 1.2 million; 1.5 million on Sundays. (Today, success is measured by digital subscriptions, currently close to 550,000.)
To meet that printed volume — for a newspaper so filled with advertising that it ranged from 100 to 200 pages daily (on the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1993, the paper was a whopping 592 pages) — managers choreographed a round-the-clock dance that pushed newsprint through the presses at nearly 30 mph, resulting in close to 60,000 papers printed in an hour.
The sound was like a thundering locomotive. Ink mist and paper dust flew through the air. Margins of error were unforgiving.
“When you’re doing it, it boggles the mind,” said Lampher, who left The Times in 2002. “I would go back tomorrow just to hear those presses running again.”
His buddy and former press room manager, Jack Boethling, 77, understands. “When you get ink in your veins, there’s nothing like the roar of the presses going at full speed.”
As the swing shift gets underway, Emmett Jaime pries inked plates off cylinders. A Dead Kennedys song plays on a radio boom box, as a bell rings a brief warning each time a cylinder turns.
Jaime, 56, plans to take a little time off before looking for another job. He’d like to work eight more years, but he followed his father to The Times when he was 19 and knows only this world.
John Martin, 60, sits at an operator’s console, studying a copy of a real estate section, whose advertiser is known to be especially picky. He’s making sure the columns of type and photographs sit squarely on the page with equal margins top and bottom.
“It’s been a great, great, great, great run,” he said, describing his 43 years with The Times. When he started, his seniority number was 380. He had hoped one day to make No. 1 but is satisfied to be No. 22. This is a moving detail; do you recall how it came up in conversation?When reporting a story like this, I try to find opportunities to simply sit with the people I’m writing about. It’s nothing more than the time-tested fly-on-the-wall technique, and it allows me to fall into the rhythm of the momen — to look, to think, to not be hurried. Often in these moments, I’m just shooting the breeze, listening and overhearing other conversations. This quote came from that kind of moment. Martin was just musing about his career, about the end of the run and what the Times has meant to him. I think he nailed it.
In the paper warehouse, Marcus Arnwine, 64, takes a quick inventory of the newsprint. Once a thick forest with rolls stacked five high to the ceiling, it is now a small glade as stock runs low.
“I’m going to miss the wealth of knowledge in this place,” said Arnwine, who started here when he was 20. “There was always someone here who knew something you needed to know.” How were you able to get time to find time to speak the crew while they were working?Before I start reporting a story like this, I will take time to explain to sources how I work and how I’d like to proceed. The sooner I get this out there, the easier the reporting is. Either they can say no or yes, and I accept either. In this instance, I made the request to just sit with the press workers during this shift, watch them, talk when they had a moment. And it was green-lighted.
Neither Martin nor Arnwine is certain what their next step will be, whether to look for work or retire.
Later that evening, Adam Lee is in the plate room imprinting digital files, produced by editors and page designers, onto aluminum sheets. The air, bathed yellow by safe lights, smells of photographic chemicals and is filled with a rhythmic clicking and a shuttling swoosh.
Lee, 46, is one of the few who has a new job lined up. He started here 18 years ago, joining his stepmother and his uncle, as well his father, who put in 47 years before retiring.
His story is a familiar one: a pressroom of multigenerational employees banking on good benefits, good income and challenging work.
“When we first started,” Hamalainen said, “it was common for an old-timer to take a new hire aside and say, ‘Well, kid, you’ll have a job for life.’ ”
Today in the building’s growing emptiness, they are still a community kept close by their commitment to that work, proud of their craft and eager to dazzle visitors with technical explanations of a job that took years to master: the speed of the paper, the proportions of water and ink, the ability to make a fix on the fly.
They knew there were risks. Some lost fingers in the presses or wrenched knees working on the floor. Some lost marriages to the strain of an unforgiving schedule.
As often as they held history in their hands — the Gulf War, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the death of John Wooden, of Kobe and the pandemic — the work never allowed lingering, and they never missed a deadline.
They lived by the clock and by schedules defined by the vastness of Southern California. They had to know when to finish a run to make a 6 a.m. delivery to Santa Barbara, San Diego, Palm Springs.
“Old news doesn’t sell,” Lampher said. I love the tone of the four grafs or so topped off with Lampher’s quote. There’s a genuine sense of appreciation for the artisty and commitment of workers who don’t often receive it. What do you recall about the conception and writing of this section?Not so long ago, I did a series of stories that focused on craft: I profiled a watch repairman, a farrier, an understudy. I enjoyed writing these stories (perhaps I saw a parallel with my own work), and they sensitized me to the pride that so many people take in jobs, especially if they’re somewhat arcane and challenging and mysterious to most everyone else. This certainly came across in my interviews for this story. These guys could dance circles around me for what they know — and what I don’t — about printing a newspaper.
By 8:44, the presses are rolling at a modest clip. Crews grab from the conveyor early copies being sidelined as waste. They thumb through pages to make sure the ink density is proper, that the color is in registration, the margins are set, pagination perfect, date accurate. Did you know the phrase “ink density” before working on this story? I certainly did not, but I like using the vernacular of the people I’m writing about. Of course, editors will sometimes question the word or the phrase if it is too esoteric, so I’m careful to pick language that is somewhat understandable, especially in context. I feel this give the piece a sense of authority and confidence that readers are looking for when they commit to reading it.
They make refinements and by 9:15 set the throttle to a full gallop, 45,000 papers an hour. Overhead, the newsprint whips by in a blur, running through a succession of cylinders inked cyan, magenta, yellow and black, before converging into a central machine that folds and cuts it into individual papers.
They feel that familiar thrum in their chests. They breathe the moist, almost humid air, and still marvel that such brutish machinery can produce such delicate results.
“It’s like an NFL player who can also be a ballerina,” Hamalainen said. “There is so much strength, power, endurance and finesse in this equipment.”
They find it hard to believe that once they are done, the presses will be dismantled and sold for scrap. The building and the property will be turned into movie and television production studios, said a spokesperson for the owner, Atlas Capital Group.
Then at 10:31, the pitch of the whirring presses begins to drop as they slow, soon coming to a stop with 107,481 copies printed.
A few minutes later, a voice comes over a loudspeaker: “No finals.”
And they are done. A conveyor clatters as the last papers are carried to the bundlers. The first delivery truck has already left. The last truck will leave at 12:45 a.m.
The swing shift now scatters. Some of the crew strip plates off the presses. Some sit back and read tomorrow’s news, eschewing The Times’ website for the printed paper. I’m fond of this observation. Do you recall at what point it struck you as something that should be included?This was a terrific moment in the reporting. The presses were running down; the last final copies of the paper were heading to the trucks. I was scribbling in my notebook, capturing these last details — this was after all the money moment, the end of it all — when I looked up. And there were most of the pressmen holding tomorrow’s paper, busy reading the stories, spending time with the reporters’ and photographers’ work beyond the requirements of their jobs. It gave me a sense of solidarity: that we are involved in this daily miracle.
I’d like to think they were doing the same thing the night this particular story was printed.
A few head to the cafeteria to watch a movie on their phones or to the fitness room for a few reps before heading home.
The witching hour has begun, a disquieting moment for them to have nothing to do. Usually, they’d be cleaning presses and getting ready for another run, but today such diligence doesn’t make much sense.
Hamalainen steps out onto the balcony where some of the crew has gathered.
From this vantage, the Olympic plant has always felt vital to Los Angeles. Two miles away, the skyscrapers of the financial district light up in the night sky, windows glowing against the darkness. City Hall glows blue and yellow in honor of Ukraine on the second anniversary of the war. Distant sirens and horns and the whoosh of the nearby freeway provide the accompanying pulse.
They speak easily among themselves, their emotions masked by familiar banter, old memories and pride.
“It used to be that the quietest time was Sunday morning,” said Hamalainen, once the week’s final run completed at 2:30 a.m.
“Yeah, and in those days, Macy’s was the big advertiser,” said pressman Joaquin Velazquez, 65. He started in 1984. “Remember that? Now, maybe there will be one ad.”
“Used to be a 16-pounder on Black Fridays.”
“Yep, and more than a million papers every day.” How did you capture this bit of dialogue?This is one of those moments that I live for when reporting a story like this: a chance to let the characters interview one another. Well, in this case, maybe not interview each other, but riff spontaneously with each other as we all tend to do in daily conversation. I especially like how they naturally began to reminisce. And yes, I was standing there not saying a thing, just trying to keep up as I wrote down their conversation.
They know they’re running on habit and adrenaline. They know there will be a bit of a freefall once they’re done.
“They’re hiring at the Arizona Republic and the Bay Area News Group and the Las Vegas Review-Journal,” Hamalainen said. “There’s work, but you have to be willing to move away.”
Velazquez draws on his cigarette. Soon, he will no longer be commuting four hours a day from his home in Eastvale.
“It’s sad to see it come to an end like this, but we’re blessed to hit the finish line,” Velazquez said.
“You know, I think I’m going to sneak back in, just to see it all cleared out,” Hamalainen said. “This is going to be one big empty building.” How did you come to end on this line? At its peak, this printing plant was running almost 20 hours a day, seven days a week. When the presses were going full speed, it must have felt like you were standing next to a locomotive flying down the track. It’s louds, it’s fast, it’s furious. So there we are at the end of the shift, one of the last shifts for these men, and as I listened to them, I heard such disbelief, incredulity that it was all coming to an end for them. And for this building — this magnificent building.
That seemed the story’s natural ending too, coming from Kal. It allowed me to plant the seed in the readers’ mind, to let them do the work and imagine how empty and cavernous this building will be once everything is removed, shipped off and carted away.
* * *
Trevor Pyle is a veteran newspaper reporter from the Pacific Northwest who now works as a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.
