My newspaper hasn't been printed properly. What should I do?

Unfortunately our production quality of late has fallen short of expectations. We are labouring with very elderly printing and inserting machinery here at Wapping, which we share with three other national newspapers. We anticipate major improvements when construction of our brand new printing plant is completed on a new site in north London in 2007. In the meantime we can only thank you for your loyalty, apologise, and hope that you will bear with us.

I don't like the way that the crossword is printed in The Times

The compact version of The Times has but one back page (the old broadsheet effectively had two) and that is only half the size of a broadsheet page. As a result there was great pressure to make best use of that page, which is also a colour site. When we changed to the compact size, we moved the crossword to the inside mono page in order to allow greater sports coverage on the back, reluctantly and fully aware of the protests that would ensue. It is always unwise to say that anything is permanent, but as far as I can see the crossword is likely to stay on the inside page.

However, many readers also told us that they disliked the horizontal layout across the bottom of the page, because the grid was too near the centre to be able to fold back evenly, and too near the bottom to supply a wrist resting place. This was compounded by the problem that, for the right-handed majority, the clues were obscured when entering a solution. In answer to all these complaints we have now taken the opportunity to reproduce as closely as possible the vertical crossword layout as it used to appear in the old broadsheet, with the clues beneath the grid - still fully aware that some protests would ensue, but in the fervent hope that most of our devoted crossword fans would approve.

My copy of The Times hasn't been folded properly. How hard can that be?

Many readers complain about the uneven fold.

The difficulty arises from the daily need, after all the sections are printed, to insert the supplements such as times2, Bricks and Mortar, Public Agenda and The Game into the main paper, or "jacket". As each jacket enters the insertion drum, a mechanical finger has to be able to slide into the centre of the paper and open it for the insertions to drop in. Like all papers that have inserts, the jacket is therefore deliberately folded slightly off-centre to provide an overlap to guide the finger in. The overlap should be 10mm, but it varies a little as the presses reach their full speed of 30,000 copies an hour. The printed area on each page should automatically adjust in advance to compensate, but sometimes the result is uneven white margins on the edges.

The overlap was present in the broadsheet, but was far less noticeable because a broadsheet is folded in half horizontally, rather than vertically, before the inserts drop in, and thus the overlap occurs at the top when it's folded, not the side (check your Sunday Times tomorrow and you'll see).

Since a great many of your complaints about the folding have been passed straight to the production staff over the past year, trust me when I say they are constantly working on improvements. And here's the really good news - a new printing plant is under construction in North London with state-of-the-art presses which will do away with this and other production difficulties. The new presses will be printing your beautifully folded, full-colour Times from 2008.

Why do you sometimes make silly, obvious mistakes?

Silly, obvious mistakes can slip by in the hurly-burly of nightly newspaper production. They shouldn't, but they do. We regularly remind our reporters and sub-editors of the need for accuracy throughout the paper at all times. We wish our faults were fewer; the only consolation is that most of the mistakes we make are harmless in themselves.