The Production Department
All newspapers produce their products differently, and there are all sorts of names for the department or departments. I know of one newspaper who calls it the manufacturing department. It used to be that the production department did everything involved in producing an ad. You'd pass them a rough sketch of the ad you sold, and the production department would typeset it on their $50,000 workstations and send it to the pressmen and print it in the newspaper.

At larger newspapers, there was a separate art department (sometimes called "creative services") that you'd send the ad to first if you needed some artistic help, and they would make a better sketch of the ad before passing it along to production. This department would also help salespeople make up what's called "spec ads". Spec ads are ads created for a potential advertiser, built on speculation, that is, before the potential advertiser has agreed to run an ad at all.

But these days, with the proliferation of Macintoshes and desktop publishing, the lines are more blurred. At your newspaper it probably works one of two ways. First, you might have one production/art department that does everything for you, from sold ads to spec ads. Or, second, you might have two departments, one called production and one called art or creative services.

In this case, your art department, which is usually part of the advertising department, will make you spec ads and give some design help to ads you've already sold that really need it. Most of these departments have Macs now, and do almost all their work on them. So now when an ad they've worked on is sold, they can transfer them directly to the production department electronically and production would make the ad ready for final printing. And any ad that you've sold that doesn't need layout help but some minor changes can go directly to the production department.