While you are sleeping, the giant five-story offset press inside the Times Free Press building on E. 11th Street in downtown Chattanooga rumbles to life.
Between the time you turn in for the night and wake up the next morning, the print version of the newspaper is manufactured, bundled, loaded and delivered. Tens of thousands of newspapers are delivered 365 days a year, with thousands more sold as single copies in racks, restaurants and retail locations.
DID YOU KNOW?
* Monitors in the newsroom track traffic on timesfreepress.com, ranking reports based on real-time readership.* The current printing press was installed in 2014 at a cost of $6.4 million, and took an entire year to assemble. During that time, the Times Free Press was printed in Knoxville and trucked back to Chattanooga each morning for delivery.
Meanwhile, the Times Free Press digital report, which is updated continuously throughout the day with breaking news at www.timesfreepress.com, is delivered around the clock to subscribers in 31 states.
While obviously an information company, the Times Free Press is also a manufacturing plant. More than 250 full-time employees work across the editorial, advertising, circulation and production departments.
Reporters arrive in the newsroom each morning to begin the process of gathering the daily news report. By afternoon, editors are proofing articles and designers are piecing together the pages in a digital process called pagination. Meanwhile, reports and updates are posted throughout the day to the newspaper's web site.
"We continue to make a deep investment in quality journalism, which we believe is a public service. Our news-gathering resources are second to none in Tennessee," says Times Free Press Editor Alison Gerber.
In addition to the daily broadsheet newspaper, the Times Free Press publishes Chatter, a lifestyle magazine; Edge, a monthly business periodical; and Get Out, a magazine for outdoors enthusiasts.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press, Chattanooga's hometown newspaper, is celebrating two big milestones in the next few months. The year 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the merger of the Chattanooga Times and the Chattanooga News-Free Press. The two former newspapers were purchased separately by WEHCO Media of Little Rock, Arkansas, in the late 1990s. The first edition of the combined Chattanooga Times Free Press hit the streets on Jan. 5, 1999.
Next year also marks the 150th anniversary of the former Chattanooga Times, which began operations four years after the end of the Civil War. A few years later, the Chattanooga Times was purchased by a young Adolph Ochs, who went on to become the modern patriarch of the New York Times. Roy Ketner McDonald, deceased former publisher of the Chattanooga News-Free Press, built his successful newspaper from a free-circulation tabloid begun in the 1930s.