Outside, hundreds of delivery vans are parked, waiting for the early morning to deliver copies of the paper to newsstands and houses across New York City. Within the plant is the Liberty View Cafe, a cafeteria for the building’s approximately 500 employees filled with freshly printed copies of the day’s newspaper on the tables and framed enlargements of notable covers on the walls, such as the ‘OVER’ edition when Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad was taken down in 2003 and the ‘From a Big House to THE Big House’ edition when Lizzie Grubman was sentenced. The newspapers are then stacked and bundled along an assembly line, and are ready to be shipped. After the ink is placed and the paper is dried, copies are brought back downstairs by machines into the mail room, where inserts such as flyers and coupons are placed inside. Approximately 300,000 copies of the Daily News are printed here on weekdays, and close to 400,000 are on weekends, with most being developed between 11:45pm and 3:00am. The content comes late at night from the publication’s Manhattan offices. Once the paper rolls are unloaded, they are stored on the first floor, before being unwrapped and fed upstairs to the 15-tower printing presses that can print 90,000 copies in an hour. Liberty View is served by its own rail line spur, and the paper itself that the text and images are printed on comes to the plant on trains from Canada. While the Liberty View plant was recently being cleaned, James Brill, the Senior Vice President of Operations for the Daily News gave Jersey Digs an exclusive tour of the 425,000 square foot facility, which also prints roughly 100 other titles for 25 other publishers, such as the New York Amsterdam News and The Brooklyn Paper, through its Daily News Publishing Solutions division. Liberty View was upgraded again in 2008, when the move was made from manual production to automation and KBA printing presses were installed. The $150 million new plant’s printers allowed for the paper to print in color for the first time. Construction began in 1994 on the plant, known as Liberty View, with a groundbreaking ceremony attended by then-Governor Christine Todd Whitman and then-Mayor Bret Schundler, and it opened in 1996. However, towards the end of the 20th century, “the facility had become obsolete,” according to the publication, and The New York Times reported that the Brooklyn plant was being supplemented by ones in Garden City, New York and Kearny.Ī need arose for a new facility, and it was decided that a former Clorox manufacturing plant at the corner of Edward Hart Drive and Theodore Conrad Drive in Jersey City’s Liberty Industrial Park would become the new home of the Daily News’ print operations. Although branded as ‘New York’s Hometown Newspaper,’ the publication that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers wake up to every morning is actually printed right here in Jersey City.įounded 98 years ago, the New York Daily News was largely printed in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood beginning in 1927 in a Pacific Street building that is currently home to the Newswalk condominiums. Now it’s roughly half that.It may be called the New York Daily News, but the New Jersey state flag flies high above the newspaper’s printing plant. Sounds like an homage to the regular New Yorkers who made the Daily News, which got its start in 1919 as the city’s first tabloid, one of the nation’s biggest newspapers throughout the 20th century.Īt the time of the building’s opening, the News had an impressive circulation of 1.3 million. It’s part of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “God must love the common people he made so many of them.” This bas relief features the newspaper name, an urban cityscape, and a crowd of people, with this inscription: “he made so many of them.” Then there’s the huge facade framing the 39-story building’s main entrance. The enormous lobby, with its illuminated revolving globe and compass points set into the floor, is an impressive monument to wonder and the bigness of the universe, as well as a nod to the newspaper’s global perspective. The (former) headquarters for the New York Daily News, on East 42nd Street, is a 1930 skyscraper masterpiece.
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