Digital Marketing

The News behind a newsppaer:

All the students of grades 7, 8 and 9 marched over to the buses parked in a grid pattern like the houses of the Indus Valley Civilization. We were all geared up and ready to drive down to the DNA (Daily News and Analysis) printing press in Vashi to learn the entire story of the newspaper that reaches our doorsteps at 7 in the morning, right from setting what percentage of coloured ink the logo on the front page needs to the proofing of the paper to insure that there are no smudges.

DNA News

The long drive from the school in Juhu down to the printing press in Navi Mumbai was predicted to take up to two hours, but time flew by- for most of us- as we chatted along with our friends, seeming to find more topics outside of the window. After asking “Are we there yet?” uncountable times, we final got there.
The printing press seemed quite a serene and quiet place from the outside, but that opinion was shattered when we heard it after we got off the bus. The transition from the somewhat cool bus to the scorching heat of the factory compelled our sweat glands to force the sweat out. There was a faint synthetic ink smell lingering in the air, wafting around the huge rolled bales of fresh recycled paper.
As we made our way through huge machines humming, we caught sight of paper being unravelled and printed on at a tremendously rapid pace. In fact, the press could produce 4500 newspapers in just an hour!  Talk about rapid news!
The people at the DNA press were simply fantastic and very helpful. They kindly explained various segments of the press in detail, answering all questions and clearing all our doubts. They diluted their talk by showing us the machines as well so we could comprehend the information visually.
After we were shown how they printed paper, the buckets of ink, how they dried it, how they printed plates, the coloured ink percentages and how they preserved the ink, we were taken into a large conference room to give us an introduction on DNA’s history as well as ‘YA!’, which is a newspaper just for kids, of which we each given a copy of.
I learnt a couple of great things there, such as the fact that they added a chemical to the ink so that it didn’t smudge. I also learnt how the newspaper was assembled and put into boxes to be carted off. I never knew that so many processes have to be followed in order to make a newspaper- right from a newspaper reporter writing an article to advertisement spaces being sold to printing it.

This experience has increased my knowledge by miles- around as many miles as there are letters in a newspaper.

Thank you DNA and their entire team for such a wonderful experience and Thank you EcoleMondiale for this amazing opportunity.

Aditya K

School Ecole Mondiale