Innovation at Los Angeles Times Olympic Facility

On July 1st Tribune chief administration officer Gerry Spector sent out a memo to Tribune Employees regarding the scaling down of products that could be selected from OfficeMax. Beginning June 30th, the number of products Tribune Employees can buy from OfficeMax will be reduced from 35,000 items to 1,000, with an annual savings of $500,000.

Not wanting to be outdone by Gerry Spector, our leaders at the Los Angeles Times have introduced and implemented many innovative measures at our production facility called Olympic, to save a few dollars.

Our clocks all display a different time at our facility, not different time zones as one Asian man asked while on a tour, but when the one triple A battery that powered the clock was spent.

Another brilliant idea was to stop the practice of giving away bandages, handling the mental printing plates result in many cuts, we now charge employees 25 cents for a bandage. This isn’t much to pay, but unfortunately the dispensers are usually broken, as you stand there bleeding onto the floor.

With an abundance of spent newsprint cores in the reel room, one of our innovative types thought we should utilized all this unused newsprint by cutting the cores down to the size of a roll of toilet paper. I’m told this serves a duel purpose (1) we will not need to purchase toilet paper (2) most employees will remain at their workstations avoiding a restroom break.

I understand times are rough Sam, but newsprint instead of soft tissue is too rough for most of us to use.

Regular tissue on left, new and improved tissue on right.