Precious Metal for Times Journalists: The Page One Plate

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/insider/front-page-press-plates.html

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The requests trickle in every two or three weeks: A reporter or photographer has made the front page of The New York Times for the first time. Could we honor them with a press plate of that day’s Page One?

Saying “yes” is one of the best parts of my job.

Commemorative plates, unused sheets of the actual aluminum plates attached to the printing presses to produce the newspaper, go to enterprising reporters fresh out of college and to writers who have toiled for decades. They go to photographers who captured the defining shot and to editors who nurtured a masterpiece.

At The Times, the tradition of presenting Page One plates to journalists for making their first A1 — the plates are also occasionally given for articles of historic impact or to signify other achievements — would seem to go back about 40 years.

The plates are made at The Times’s printing plant in College Point, Queens, and delivered by hand to Manhattan, where a point person — often, that’s me, an editor on the print newspaper staff — distributes them to the departments.

Emily Cochrane, who covers Congress, received her plate in 2017 for a shared front-page byline describing an attack on a baseball practice among Republican lawmakers. It was her first week on the job. Her plate traveled from New York to Washington in an editor’s luggage, and was eventually presented by Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief.

“There’s something wonderfully tangible and even more powerful about that aluminum plate,” Ms. Cochrane said. She said she hoped to receive one for another article for her mother to display.

These mementos are relatively recent in The Times’s 170-year history.

“Before 1978, plates weighed 43 pounds,” said David W. Dunlap, a reporter who retired from The Times in 2017 and still serves as an unofficial in-house historian.

Commemoratives, Mr. Dunlap said, were typically cast only for extraordinary occasions like the 1969 moon landing.

By 1981, though, the company had switched to offset printing, with aluminum plates. The inked plate transfers images to a rubber blanket, which then hits the paper.

The commemorative plates, however, do not see any printing action, according to Mike Connors, the managing director at College Point.

A used plate, Mr. Connors said, “would be filthy, dirty, bent, and it would have holes punched into it to attach it to the presses.” The plant uses more than 1,400 plates a day to print The Times and other newspapers, then recycles the plates, he said.

With the newsroom scattered because of the coronavirus pandemic, the delivery of plates has become more sporadic. Mr. Connors has been mailing more commemoratives in boxes that are altered and heavily taped to fit the plates’ 12-by-23-inch dimensions. Reporters have picked up their own plates in Manhattan while we try different distribution options.

One of my first mailings, swaddled in foam, cardboard, tape and just a little more tape that was begged from a stranger at the post office, went to Shawn Hubler, a reporter in Sacramento who joined The Times last year. Ms. Hubler, whose newspaper career dates back to the days of Royal typewriters with carbon paper, received her plate in October for an article that ran months earlier, on May 22. She and her husband toasted its arrival.

“When I got that plate in the mail, in the midst of a very sad year, for work I had done just for the joy of working, from an institution that is the pinnacle of this profession, it felt like a kind of grace,” she wrote in an email.

Presentations are rare these days because of the pandemic, but one such delivery I made was to the Metro reporter Ed Shanahan in December, when I had to run errands in his Manhattan neighborhood. We met on a frigid sidewalk as the clock ran down on alternate-side parking. It had been a long wait for Mr. Shanahan, who shared a front-page byline in February.

“Where it might go in my apartment is a riddle,” he mused later. He was most excited to share it with his father, a retired newsman.

His feelings echoed a sentiment that first crystallized for me in 2018, when a plate arrived for Eliza Shapiro, an education reporter. On a whim, I invited her mother, Susan Chira, a longtime editor at The Times who would later leave the paper, for an especially personal presentation on the Metro desk.

That evening, I reflected on this rare intersection of family and professional legacy, and wondered what my own children would receive from me. It was only then that I understood how much this simple rite mattered — not just to the recipient but also to everyone who had cheered them on along the way.