MIDDLESBORO — The process of printing a daily newspaper is a complicated operation with many disparate parts. After stories are collected during the day, laid out on the page in the afternoon, and then printed the next morning, the paper must then be filled with ad inserts, bundled, and distributed throughout the region. Thanks to a new inserting machine installed in the Daily News pressroom, one of the last legs of that process just got a lot speedier.

“It definitely does cut time,” said Stephanie Floyd, Supervisor for the Inserting Department at the Daily News. “When it runs good and everything runs the way it should be, we can get the Daily News out in 40 minutes tops.”

While advertising fliers were inserted into the newspapers by hand before, the inserter machine (called the Kansa 480) can make the process much faster with only seven workers. According to Press Foreman Roger Kirk, the employees put the papers on loading trays that are equipped with suction cups. The suction holds the papers and a burst of air inserts the fliers. The newspapers are then picked up by rollers, which move them along a track.

Floyd said at that point, the machine can even recognize bad papers coming through the machine and sort them away from the good copies. It also gives watermarks to every 25th paper on the assembly line, speeding up the counting process to make bundles of 25 and 50 for the different publications.

After the newspapers are given watermarks, they are spit out into a tray, sorted, bundled, and given to the carriers for delivery.The machine can process roughly 12,500 papers an hour.

“The machine will speed up the process of packaging the complete newspaper and help us improve getting the paper out the door more quickly,” said Publisher Tom Spargur. “We currently publish the Middlesboro Daily News, Cumberland Trading Post, Claiborne Progress and effective August 4th, we will process the Harlan Daily Enterprise’s inserting at this location as well.”

Right now, Kirk and Floyd said they’re still getting the kinks worked out of the machine. But they’re confident it will speed up the process of getting newspapers out the door and distributed across the Tri-State.

“When we get the bugs out and it runs smooth, it will be a time saver,” said Kirk.

Stephen Woodward is a Staff Writer for the Daily News. He may be contacted at swoodward@middlesborodailynews.com.