For decades, late nights at The Cavalier Daily ended with three highly anticipated words: "Roll the page!"

The operations manager would grab a roller and whip it over the pasted pages, making sure no paragraph was in danger of becoming unstuck. Within minutes, the flats were ready for their journey to the printing plants in Culpeper.

This year, those words may still be uttered, but there is nothing left to roll. The CD has turned to the wonders of digital delivery and is now sending the laid-out pages over the Internet to Culpeper, where they arrive almost instantaneously with the click of a button.

"We cut out an hour in travel time and an hour in prep time once the paper gets to Culpeper," said John Clark, the CD’s editor-in-chief.

Eric Hutchins, director of information technology for the paper, calls it the end of an era. "No more wax, no more hot rollers," he said.

Most importantly, the digital system will allow the CD to save money, Clark said.

The paper no longer has to pay courier John King or his subcontractors for the trip to Culpeper. And even more significantly, the CD can use that extra hour to avoid late fees. The contract with the Culpeper Star-Exponent states that the CD must cough up an extra 5 percent of printing costs every time it misses the 1 a.m. deadline, and then pay another 15 percent for every arrival past 4 o’clock in the morning.

Clark said he was embarrassed to admit it, but the paper had been rolling late more often than not because it has gotten so big. "It’s usually 1:30 or 2 at night," he said. "And there are some days that just sneak up on us and we are there until 4:30." But since the system makes it far more feasible to make the deadline, he said, the paper could save as much as $200 a night.

The shift to online delivery is the latest in a series of upgrades that have rendered old technology obsolete. Staff members at the CD into the early ’90s probably remember Maggie, the crotchety old typesetter used with the old Compugraphics system. And it is unlikely that anyone is crying over the demise of that little black tape that had to be laid so gingerly around the borders of boxes and photographs.

For more memories, ask Jack Griffin, the production manager for the Media General Community Newspapers of central and southwest Virginia, which includes the Culpeper Star-Exponent.

He said that he can remember a time, probably 30 years ago, when the CD had to send photos to Culpeper on a Trailways bus every night at 6 p.m. The plant needed the photos that early, he said, because workers there were actually taking photographs of the original photos to include in the negatives created by the printing press.

And what would happen when the CD missed that 6 p.m. deadline for photos? "They’d have to drive them up," Griffin said.

A digital system called File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, has now made that drive a thing of the past. When files are sent by FTP, they travel over the Internet and show up on computer screens at the receiving end as long as the recipient has the right password to gain access to them.

FTP systems have been around since the Net’s early days, but receiving the files via FTP was not easy for Culpeper until the press bought a high-speed image setter this summer. The CD managing board pushed the Star-Exponent to make the purchase, Clark said, when it renewed its contract this year.

While speed is one of the system’s greatest attributes, Hutchins and Clark are also raving about the better color quality it brings. With digital delivery, photographs do not have to be created in layers and then reassembled—a process that often introduced strange shadows and pigments. Clark said the paper plans to use color on every front page and every sports page starting this fall.

The 48-page summer mail-out was the CD’s digital guinea pig. Everything went very smoothly, Hutchins said, with the exception of a few glitches in advertisements that were caught before printing.

A few times, he said, the production staff in Culpeper would open an advertisement and find that the fonts were missing. That was because Culpeper’s system did not store the exact same fonts. As long as the CD embeds the fonts in the files, he said, there are no problems.

Clark said he is attempting to head off another potential downside: the lack of physical pages to proof. It is not easy to catch errors by simply reading copy on a computer screen, he said, and so he is requiring that every page be printed out for a final edit by him.

In addition, he said, "the only person authorized to hit the send button is the operations manager," to ensure that pages are not sent to Culpeper prematurely.

So now CDers have a new topic to discuss—what to do with the backroom.

The laser printer, Clark said, is no longer needed, and the tables that displayed the flats are simply collecting dust. The CD will probably sell the tables to the Architecture school or A-School students, he said.

That leaves plenty of empty space.