Before most people have settled in behind their desks and taken the ritual jolt of caffeine, Tom Walter, press foreman for the Denver Newspaper Agency, is at work. But then, there isn't really any downtime for him. Walter runs the printing operations at the DNA's building on 570 W. 53rd Place, tucked away in a little corner off the highway in unincorporated Adams County.

To keep things profitable, DNA presses run off more than just the DNA's own newspapers. Start-up magazines come to Walter for their printing needs, and the presses run off editions of the New York Times that go out to Colorado, New Mexico and parts of Utah and Wyoming.

"In 2000 we got the contract to print the local edition of the New York Times," Walter says. "That's when we got the new press which is leaps and bounds better than the old one."

The new press is a beastly Goss Heidelberg Mercury, which cranks its way through a 900-pound roll of newsprint like it's the last sheets of toilet paper in order to bring you the paper every day. But first your paper has to get there.

"We'll start getting YourHub at 3 or 4 o' clock," Walter says, clicking through the previous day's haul on a computer near the plate room. "You get one edition, one multi-page PDF. Just making plates is probably going to take 8 hours."

These plates are aluminum sheets that strip the printing process down to its four base colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Together, they form the full-color photos that make it to print. He clicks through previews to show how the elaborate choreography of color comes together. Alone, each plate lays down color that would look like an overexposed high-contrast photo, or maybe something out of a Warhol painting.

The plates are etched in a room lit with a sickly yellow. White light would damage them, Walter explains. From there, it's a complex chemical process for plates to transfer ink to the page - something he's had 18 years to learn about since his start as an unskilled worker, a "jogger," at the press in 1990.

Experience, though, can be handy, and it doesn't always come cheaply.

"Printing by its nature is dangerous. Back when safety wasn't an issue, people lost fingers, thumbs, hands, limbs." Most of these gaps in safety, he said, started getting patched up with the growth of labor movements, but even in the 70s, the system was imperfect. "You see some of the older guys from the industry and they are missing fingers." Now, he says, "it's virtually impossible to get into the areas that have chewed hands off." As the science of printing evolved, each injury prompted a new safeguard, a new redundant system, a new regulation to keep everybody in one piece. "I've seen people stuck in presses before. It's ugly. It turns your flesh to hamburger."

But if the industry has mostly phased out this more grim reminder of its old-time roots, there's still the rare pleasure in acting out that iconic Hollywood moment: the chance to yell "stop the presses!"

It's a rarity, of course. "You stop the presses, you just lost 10,000 copies," Walter says. "I've only got to run out to the press maybe twice but it is fun when it happens because it is like the movies."