Presses put out 28,000 papers an hour--now still

They won’t print the Boston Herald in Boston anymore. Presses that once put out 28,000 papers an hour have been stilled and 130 jobs lost. Joe Fitzgerald on Boston Herald.com laments the loss

By JOE FITZGERALD
You can’t miss someone you never knew, so even longtime Herald readers won’t have a hint of the emptiness and sadness many of us are experiencing here this morning amid the all-too-familiar drill of hugs and handshakes and promises to keep in touch.

Once again, technology has made humanity expendable.

Some call it progress and perhaps it is, but when it means people no longer matter, it’s awfully hard to embrace.

This was the final edition of the Herald to roll off our ink-stained presses, those enormous steel dinosaurs, three stories high, that whirred and rumbled, making the building vibrate while whipping out 28,000 papers an hour.

Inanimate? Of course they were.

And yet there was was something wonderfully intimate about them. To step into our lobby at midnight, feeling their rhythmic pulsation while grabbing a paper so fresh it was as warm as a muffin coming out of an oven, was an occasion for goosebumps every time, if newspapering is in your blood.

But now they’ve been silenced and will soon be dismantled.

Tomorrow’s Herald will inaugurate a new era in which the printing will be done on offset presses in Chicopee, eliminating the jobs of 130 colleagues who did nothing to deserve the heartache of saying goodbye, not just to one another but to a profession most of them had loved all of their lives.