When I woke up this morning, I was unaware that my first class would be taking a morning-long field trip to the Buffalo News. So when I walked into my classroom and noticed some unfamiliar faces from a later class, I didn’t know what was going on. With some help from the other students, I figured out what was happening. We hopped aboard three Medaille vans and took a short drive to downtown Buffalo, where the News is located. Our tourguide took us from floor to floor, explaining the different types of work there is to do related to the completion of the paper.

We also learned a lot about the history of the paper, and how it has developed over time. We were taken through a timeline of production techniques, which were very interesting. Today, everything is done on a computer, but obviously, this was not always the case. In the past, each page of the paper would have to be made into a 40-pound imprint of the content. 25,000 copies of the paper could be completed in an hour using the old techniques. Today, 75,000 copies of the paper are printed in an hour. It’s really cool to see how far we have been able to advance over time.

In addition to this field trip, I have another field trip that I will be leaving for in less than an hour. The newspaper staff is hiking out to St. John Fisher, and it should be a lot of fun. I’ll let you know how it goes!