How The New York Times Works

1:35 A.M. A Tuesday

Ernie Booth, the operations manager of the main printing plant of The New York Times, is walking the floor. The plant is a 515,000-square-foot building in Queens, on the Van Wyck Expressway, half a mile from LaGuardia Airport. Booth is a big man with enthusiasm to match his heft, and tonight he’s wearing a collared shirt, sweater, and chinos in various shades of beige. He glides through the place like a small-town mayor, jabbing the noisy air with quick chin nods, offering ritual greetings to some of the 350 employees who work here each night.

“What’s happening, Tom?”

“Hey, Andy.”

“All quiet, Dennis?”

Dennis Díaz, a coordinator in the control room, responds that one section of the plant’s fourteen miles of conveyor belts is not working.

Booth draws a breath and scans the control room, a glass-walled office he compares to an indoor air traffic control tower, overlooking the floor. “You see all these flashing things?” he says, pointing to one of several screens displaying different parts of the plant. “Flashing things are bad. Flashing things mean we have a problem.” He appears to have a lot of problems at the moment. But this night is not much different from most, and Booth’s only real complaint as he circulates the floor is that he’d rather be on his wheels: The plant is so large that many employees travel from one area to another on adult-size tricycles. (Booth has a trike and a golf cart.) During daylight hours, when the plant isn’t in use, the Times sometimes rents it out—in the most recent Jason Bourne movie, it stood in as a crowded factory in the Philippines.

#meanwhile