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Skip to content Exploring Reach's Watford printing site.A Day at Reach. Charlie & I have just finished our third training session. Every Wednesday for ten weeks, we get to meet different Media Owners in their offices, where we learned the basics of planning & buying different media types. Yesterday, we met up at the Reach printing site in Watford where their daily titles, regional press & some other papers from other publishers are being printed. Whilst we did learn the essentials of what to consider when planning display ads & inserts, the highlight of the day was the tour through the printing site.It was amazing to see what goes into the actual process of printing & distribution. The Reach Site is one of the biggest in Europe. They have twenty presses which are all in service at night when most of the printing is done. Each press achieves over 16,000 copies an hour. I have also never seen a warehouse of this size; they store paper for 7-10 days’ worth of printing, which is the equivalent of going around the world once. The entire process is fully automated from printing to packaging the finished products, before they get sent down to the lorries. Even the paper taken from the warehouse to the printing site is moved by fully automated robot-like forklifts, which will stop when people pass by. Only three presses were active whilst we were there, but nonetheless it was impressive. I cannot imagine how busy the site must get every night when all presses are operating on full speed.
