NEW ORLEANS — On June 30, 1958, at 10:45 a.m., President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood in the White House conference room and pushed a ceremonial Western Union gold telegraph key, closing a 375-mile circuit connected to the press controls at The Buffalo (N.Y.) Evening News, officially starting up the newspaper’s new Wood Metropolitan letterpresses.

After an eight-year quest to find new presses, The Buffalo (N.Y.) News decided to replace the 43-year-old letterpresses in its downtown facility with two new KBA Coloras.
Photo courtesy of KBA

The newspaper, which has since dropped the Evening from its moniker and moved to all-day delivery, still has one of the largest letterpress operations in the United States. That will change in less than two years, however, when The News installs two new KBA Colora presses at the downtown facility it has occupied for more than 43 years.

The Buffalo News and KBA reached an agreement on the new presses on June 1, but KBA decided to wait until Nexpo to officially announce the deal. The first of two presses is scheduled to go into production in December 2003, and the second in March 2004.

In order to install the $35-million presses, The News (daily, 225,935; Sunday, 307,825) will first have to expand the downtown facility, raising the roof of the building to 78 feet from its current height of 54 feet. That project is set to begin in April 2002. The expansion will cost the newspaper an additional $1.5 million. Many newspapers across the country, when doing a major installation, have taken the opportunity to invest in brand new buildings usually located in the suburbs of the cities they serve. The Buffalo News, however, chose to remain in downtown Buffalo, which has been home to the newspaper for 121 years.

“We’re very committed to the importance of downtown and the entire region,” said Stanford Lipsey, publisher of The News. “We’ve got a downtown that needs a lot of renovation, so for us to pull out would have been a terrible loss.”

The decision to purchase the Coloras was a long road for the newspaper, which started looking at ways to replace the letterpresses back in 1993. Last year, The News came close to purchasing presses from The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. That plan was scuttled when The News & Observer decided to abandon plans to replace its 6-year-old KBA flexo presses.

The Coloras, which run at 75,000 copies per hour, will feature a cylinder circumference of 43 inches with a web width of 50 inches, and will allow the news to print 24 full-color broadsheet pages in straight production. They will each be configured into five 4-high towers plus two H-type units.

They will also each have 10 angle bars and two folder assemblies, each with three formers positioned side-by-side to offer The News a variety of layout options. One press line will have a KBA KF 5 jaw folder and a RF 3 gear folder, while the second press will have a RF 3 gear folder.

The presses will be controlled via three EAE control consoles, which will also feature EAE’s job scheduling, prepress preset system and a service and diagnostics PC.

Gene Warner, news staff reporter for The Buffalo News, contributed to this story.