Yellow Pages
What’s the difference between a publishing company’s building and any other office building?
Not much (until you start looking closely) on the office side of Skagit Publishing’s new facilities.
But a whole bunch if you cross over into the production and press side of the building.
The $13 million, 59,000-square-foot Skagit Publishing facility is, in a sense, two buildings connected by a corridor that includes a lunch room, fitness area and employee entrance. From above, the buildings on Anderson Road in south Mount Vernon roughly form a huge “U” pointing to the north.
Most of the office building is a long open room suffused with natural lighting from skylights and big windows. Offices and conference rooms line each side of the room.
This is where the editorial department, business office, advertising department, classified advertising sales staff, Web site team, Commercial Printing staff, Newspaper in Education coordinator, human resources office and support staff do their work.
Improved communication
At the far end of the space is the “newsroom,” not really a room so much as a large area where reporters, editors, copy editors, photographers and news assistants put together our daily and weekly newspapers as well as many special publications.
The cubicles are designed to be high enough to create some privacy, but not so high that they create a warren of isolated spaces.
Unlike old newsrooms, ours isn’t filled with the clatter of typewriters and teletype machines. In fact, the high ceilings and use of noise-absorbing materials keeps the place pretty quiet.
The open format allows people from all departments to easily interact with each other.
Publisher Stedem Wood said that consolidating the company’s operations in a single building will allow for better internal communication and create new efficiencies in printing and other production processes.
The company’s administrative offices are also in this wing, as well as a community room large enough for staff gatherings (the room is also available on a limited basis to local organizations).
If you take a building tour, you’ll be able to see the “server farm” — a collection of computer servers at the heart of our information technology department.
Skagit Publishing’s new press is housed in an auditorium-sized building filled with a maze of complex and highly sophisticated machinery designed to print, fold, sort, stack and bundle a wide variety of publications — including the Skagit Valley Herald and Skagit Publishing’s weekly newspapers, special publications, Niche division products and Commercial Printing orders.
A forest of newsprint rolls — stacked nearly to the rafters — stands ready to feed the press continuously and automatically, without stopping to switch over to a new roll.
The Commercial Printing equipment is in separate rooms adjacent to the big press room. The circulation department is also housed in this side of the complex, as are facilities for our newspaper carriers who pick up the bundles at the loading dock on the far east side of the building.
