In the first of five articles marking Newspaper Week, SUZANNE McFADDEN watches as the Herald rolls off the presses.
Thousands of fresh newspapers snake across the ceiling like an endless millipede.
Inky the robot delivers another 1.4 tonne roll of paper to a skyscraper of a tower printing out streams of dizzying colour.
When the clock reaches 280,000 copies - some time in the wee small hours - everyone goes home.
Bouncing in the back of a truck, the Herald is on its way to you.
By the time the paper reaches the mailbox, it has already passed through many hands - not all of them human.
You may think you are the first person to read the scoop of the day, but you are more likely to be the 10th.
When a journalist writes a story on his or her computer, it passes by the eye of the chief reporter, the news editor, who determines where it will end up in the paper, and often the editor.
It then passes through the hands of a bank of subeditors, who fit it on to a page, write headlines and check for any oversights.
Even in the world of up-to-the-minute technology, some things never change in the production of a newspaper.
After the completed news pages are converted into a full-size photographic negative at the Herald offices in the heart of Auckland City, a courier drives them down the Southern Motorway to the massive printing presses at Ellerslie.
In the dark of the night, the cathedral-like building on the edge of the motorway is lit up like Las Vegas.
Inside, $250 million of machinery starts whirring once the last page arrives.
Negatives are turned into printing plates, using the world's purest aluminium. The plates are wrapped around rollers in huge towers that mesh colours together - black, magenta, cyan and yellow.
On a Friday night alone, the Weekend Herald sucks up 700kg of ink.
It is a messy business - ink dust hangs in the air and settles on every surface.
And it's noisy. The machine that cuts and folds the newspaper pumps out a deafening 112 decibels, but it is muted by steel doors.
Newsprint streams through machines in an indecipherable blur. At top speed they can spit out 70,000 copies an hour - or 19 newspapers a second.
The printers spend at least half an hour churning out dummy copies, checking a grey strip along the bottom of each page to make certain they have the right balance of inks.
Overhead, the newspapers speed along tracks like a Los Angeles freeway system, helped by thousands of robotic hands.
On the ground, wheeled robots are at work - running around with newsprint rolls and emptying the garbage. They have names such as Inky, Buzz, Zippy and Supersonic.
"When there's no work to do, they tootle off and plug themselves into their battery chargers - it's a robot's equivalent of a cappuccino break," says the manager of the Ellerslie printing plant, Ian Rowlandson.
The Herald uses 600 tonnes of newsprint a week.
The New Zealand-made paper costs $1600 a tonne - it works out at roughly $2 worth of paper in each copy.
The first bundle of newspapers slides off the conveyer belt and on to a waiting truck around 11.15 pm - if everything has gone withouta hitch.
"We have to work to a tight deadline - it's our policy that everyone has to get their paper by 6 am," says Mr Rowlandson.
Before midnight, the first copies are on the counters at service stations in central Auckland.
The first truck off the rank is bound for Taupo; the final delivery is made to Remuera, when the last edition rolls off the presses at 3.30 am.
<i>Newspaper week:</i> World of news all in a night's work
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