Editor's Note: The Daily's editorial board acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. The piece is a special feature that does not represent the Daily's standard journalistic practices. 
At 5:30 am, Jasson Bitencourt arrives at the Gannett Boston Offset, where the Daily is printed each day. The smell of ink lingers in the air from the freshly printed newspapers, as he begins stacking the 3,000 copies of the Tufts Daily into the back of his car.
Bitencourt is the newspaper courier for the Daily. He and his family have been distributing the Daily for four years, ever since Bitencourt’s father acquired the delivery service Superior One Deliveries through a friend.
Every morning, Bitencourt arrives at campus around 6 a.m. His route starts at the Danish Pastry House and continues across campus, concluding at 200 Boston Ave. Bitencourt strategically drives across Tufts -- he times his stops to correspond with the opening times of different buildings. Oftentimes, Bitencourt has to recycle yesterday’s paper to make space for today’s, but otherwise, it is a simple drop on the building’s stoop. By 7:40 a.m., the sun has fully risen, and the final stack of newspapers has been delivered.
While driving down the near-empty highway to the Boston Offset in Norwood, Mass., Bitencourt spoke of the benefits of his early paper route.
“I feel like waking up early gets me ready for my day,” Bitencourt said. “I wake up [at] 4:30 a.m., drive a little … I walk and run around delivering the papers. I try to make it as fun as possible.”
The Gannett Boston Offset, the printing branch of Gannett Company that has worked with the Daily for four years, is closing its Norwood site on Jan. 31, 2016 as part of a deal with the Boston Globe, which is acquiring the Boston facility.
As part of the Boston Globe acquisition, dozens of the Boston Offset's employees will be facing layoffs, according to an Oct. 9 article by the Boston Business Journal. Commercial Printing Manager of the Boston Offset Sue Byers was unable to comment on the reasons for the closing or on the future of the employees.
Before its printing at the Boston Offset, the Daily begins its production process every night in the basement of Curtis Hall, where articles are edited and the paper is laid out. According to Production Director Andrew Stephens, an article goes through many stages before it lands in Tufts students' hands. After multiple rounds of editing from section editors, copy editors and managing editors, the article is published online. But according to Stephens, a senior, this is only the beginning of the printing process.
“At that point, you pretty much just have a blank page and have to assemble it in a way that fits,” Stephens said. “We have a bunch of tricks in layout to make things fit if there’s not enough or too much [content].”
To fill this blank page, the layout team works to organize stories in order of priority, adding photos and smaller details such as jump words or photo credits along the way, Stephens said. Once the layout is set and checked over, each page is converted to PDFs and sent to the printer.
Working from a simple brick building in Norwood, which is about a 30-minute drive from campus, the Boston Offset is located in one large, fluorescent-lit room housing a slew of massive offset printers. According to Byers, the offset printing process starts with the digital image of a page, which is imprinted on a metal plate. This plate is used as a template for the printer to create each page of the newspaper. The machines used at the Boston Offset can print about 32,000 Daily-sized pages with a four-color scheme per hour, Byers said.
According to Byers, there is a unique set of problems that accompanies working with printing production and printers. In an email to the Daily, Byers added that the machines are subject to technical difficulties that are dealt with by an in-house technology services department. Additionally, problems with the PDFs -- such as incorrect fonts and images that are not embedded -- can crop up. However, if everything goes smoothly, and all issues get resolved, the copies of the Daily are neatly stacked in the Boston Offset in the early morning hours, ready to be delivered by Bitencourt.
Byers also commented on the impact the digitization of printing has had over the course of her 30 years working in the printing industry, as it has led to a demand for faster performance with fewer staff.
"It was a different time,” Byers said of her early years working in the printing industry. “Deadlines weren't as tight. You had the time it took. The time it would take to do a job was probably three times the amount of time it takes now. You had to have a lot more people working on the job … [Today,] the job that would take four people to do is down to one person.”
According to Bitencourt, the Daily is Superior One Deliveries' first and only newspaper client, and the company is having difficulty finding additional accounts. This challenge is one way in which the decline of the print industry has affected the family industry.
Stephens still believes that having a physical presence on campus is a part of the Daily’s image, and explained that the publication is not planning on giving up, despite its online growth.
“I think it is important to have some sort of printed paper on campus just so you have a presence and, even if [people] don’t pick up the Tufts Daily and read it cover to cover everyday, they see it all the time, which, if nothing else, will drive traffic to our website,” Stephens said. “We’re definitely seeing more traffic on our website...with somewhat of a decline of our print paper [readership]…[but] we still see plenty of people [reading] the print paper.”
Stephens hopes that the Daily’s commitment to print does not overshadow the need for developing the newspaper's online presence, especially in light of recent updates to the Tufts Daily website. He believes that the Daily should be making a transition to a more online-focused model of publishing.
“I really want to make sure…that the website and the print have roughly equal priority, [and] if not, that we’re doing more for the website,” Stephens said. “I think we have a little more focus on print than we should. That’s just one of our internal battles."
Trends in the newspaper industry show that the circulation of print is decreasing. Furthermore, large newspapers’ online presence is outpacing their circulation. According to a study published this April from the Pew Research Center on Journalism and Media, both weekday and Sunday circulation decreased by about three percent from 2013 to 2014. Additionally, many of the largest newspapers in the country have seen their digital audience begin to exceed their print audience.
“For these largest newspapers, their digital audience numbers far outpace circulation: The New York Times reported an average weekday print circulation of less than 650,000 in September 2014,” the Pew Research Center study said. “But their website and associated apps attracted nearly 54 million unique visitors in January 2015, and the majority of their paid circulation comes from digital sources (about 1.4 million).”
This conversation has also found its way into the classroom at Tufts. In an Experimental College (ExCollege) course offered this fall, "Social Media: Participatory Culture and Content Creation in Society," co-teachers Ben Rubenstein and Jesse Littlewood lead their class in discussions about the changes being observed in modern journalism. Rubenstein is the senior manager of social media and online community at TechTarget, a solely-online media company that runs over 120 websites. According to the ExCollege website, "Littlewood is the digital strategist with Echo & Company, a Somerville-based firm that consults with non-profits, government agencies and socially responsible businesses."
In a presentation that Rubenstein gave to the class earlier this semester, he quoted social media theorist Clay Shirky's article Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”
Rubenstein commented on Shirky's ideas as they pertain to the decline of the print industry.
“I think that when it comes to all the discussion about the print industry dying and all that's going to happen to newspapers, people kind of conflate...the delivery mechanism that we use to get certain things or that news organizations use to give news to the audience versus the actual product of the news itself,” Rubenstein said.
According to Rubenstein, newspapers should accommodate the preferences of their audience, which includes maintaining a digital presence. One hurdle for digital news is maintaining revenue, he said. While some newspapers use paywalls, paid premium services and revenue from social media ads to make money online, a sustainable model for digital revenue has yet to be found.
"[Newspapers] have to figure out how to be where their audiences are and [how to] deliver things in the way their audiences want them to be delivered, and I think that's the main thing that people should be focused on and...[figuring] out how to make that economically sustainable," he said.
However, for those who have worked in the print industry for as long as Byers has, print holds a special familiarity and unforgettable quality.
“Usually people like me who have been in the business this long, it's in our blood," Byers said. "The smell of the paper, the smell of the ink, you know, you recognize it.”
Printing in the Digital Age: Behind the Scenes at The Tufts Daily
