NORWICH – For the final installment in our 'Punching the Clock' series in honor of Manufacturers Week, I stopped in to Sun Printing to take a look at the behind the scenes process of how our newspapers go from a file on our computers to a tangible paper that circulates around Chenango County.

I learned that there are several steps in place in order to get our paper printed, and The Evening Sun is only one of the many publications that Sun Printing is responsible for producing.

On a weekly basis, Sun Printing prints nine different Pennysavers, two outside newspapers, as well as The Evening Sun. The largest of these publications is the Norwich Pennysaver with a circulation of about 17,000. The Evening Sun is printed in about 3,700 copies daily, Monday through Friday. Circulation and Pressroom Coordinator Marty Conklin estimates that there are 75 employees responsible for delivering the paper and Pennysavers on a daily basis.

I visited Sun Printing on Thursday, and The Evening Sun was the only thing being printed at the time. I found that the first step in printing the paper is to transmit the day's paper from the computer to the plate processor, which then takes all the images from the computer and burns them onto an aluminum plate. The plates are then put on the cylinders of the printing press itself.