I had an interesting experience this week, one that showed how much the world has changed because of technology.

I took part in an Adult Community Center tour of the Henle Printing plant at its new location in Marshall’s industrial park. Owner Charlie Stark and Production Manager Marc Klaith introduced the group to the set of machines that produce a massive amount of printed materials.

They also gave a demonstration. They printed off 800 programs for the Marshall Tiger football season on a machine that automatically puts pages in order and staples them.

Henle’s has only one offset press with ink. The others are all digital and are equipped with ink jets. It reflects how printing has gone almost completely digital in the past 30 years.

After the tour Stark told me that the printing industry is still experiencing consolidation. Small print shops have become rare. Larger ones constantly face the need to innovate and stay competitive.

Marshall has a vibrant printing sector led by Henle Printing, Western Printing and Sky Printing. They succeed even though they’re far away from service centers. Klaith said they’ll often help each other if someone has a machine that breaks down.

I was very interested in seeing the new print shop since I’ve spent most of my career in publishing. In the early 1990s I did composition work at the Independent in addition to some reporting.

I worked with broadsheets, exacto knives, border tape, pica poles, and waxers. Our pages went to the camera plate area and from there to the pressroom.

In 1992 I became a full-time reporter. I never learned how to paginate pages on a computer. I didn’t want to be an editor who spent almost all working hours at a desk. I wanted to report because it involved learning new things and interacting with a wide range of people.

I worked at the Minneota Mascot for about a year in 2012 and 2013. I was in charge of putting out an edition when my publisher took a week off to visit his mother in Oregon.

The staff did almost all of the pagination. I drew old fashioned layout sheets for them as a guide to putting pages together. Once the pages were partly finished we lined them up on Jon Guttormsson’s layout board in his print shop. I needed the hard copies in order to decide on layout changes.

The old way worked. We finished our production day at 2 p.m., three hours ahead of our deadline. I told my 20-something composition person that I hoped she didn’t mind my strategy. She said she liked it better than the new way and wished we could do it all the time.

It was a modification that probably won’t ever happen again at a newspaper. Like printing, it’s all computer based.

The new way is faster for people who master it. It takes fewer people to publish editions. At the Independent our big 1950s Goss press stands silent.

I can almost hear echoes of the press runs. The pressroom still smells like ink after almost 20 years of being shut down. The modern print shops don’t smell like ink.

It was a good experience to do composition early in my career. I could still do it if the world’s electronic network ever caved in on itself, if it ever crashed and burned. That’s how much a traditional industrial skill stays with someone.

Even though I’m a relic of the past when it comes to printing, I enjoyed seeing the current way of doing things.

It proves that printing is still alive and well. The printed word hasn’t vanished. It’s just produced in a different more mechanized way.

It will continue as long as people like holding reading material in their hands. A high school football fan is likely to prefer a printed program instead of searching a smart phone. Someone buying a car or another big ticket item might want all the information on paper instead of having to search it out.

Stark told the tour group that Henle Printing is the region’s largest bulk mailer. It’s yearly postage expense runs well into six figures.

Printing remains vital to daily life. It still serves a purpose. It’s an industry that has an illustrious past and that still has a future.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent