Reading Fill Blank
is used to produce aluminum printing plates ready for the presses. A procession of automated
vehicles is busy at the new printing center where the Sydney Moming
Herald is printed each day. With lights flashing and waming homs honking, the robots [to give
them their correct name, the LGVS or laser-guided vehicles] look for all the world like
enthusiastic machines from a science fiction movie, as they follow their own random paths around
the plant busily getting on with their jobs. Automation of this kind is now standard in all modem
newspaper plants. The robots can detect unauthorized personnel and alert security
staff immediately if they find an intruder; not surprisingly, tall tales are already
being told about the machines starting to take on personalities of their own.
The robots' principal job, however, is to shift the newsprint [the printing paper] that arrives at
the plant in huge reels and emerges at the other end sometime later as newspapers. Once the size of
the day's paper and the publishing order are determined at head office, the information is punched
into the computer and the LGVs are programmed to go about their work. The LGVs collect the
appropriate size paper reels and take them where they have to go. When the press needs another
reel, its computer alerts the LGV-System. The Sydney LGVs moves busily around the press room
fulfilling their two key functions to collect reels of newsprint either from the reel stripping
stations, or from the racked supplies in the newsprint storage area.
At the stripping station the tough wrapping
that helps to protect a reel of paper from rough handling is removed.
