The Honolulu Advertiser, a Gannett Co. Inc. publication, signed an agreement with MAN Roland to purchase two RegioMAN offset presses that will be installed at a new $81-million production facility in Kapolei, Hawaii.

The new RegioMAN shaftless pressline will bring The Honolulu Advertiser (daily, 152,098; Sunday, 173,336) from letterpress printing into the world of offset lithography. The offset presses will provide improved color capacity and clearer and sharper images in the paper.

The RegioMAN shaftless presses at The Honolulu Advertiser will be configured into 12 eight-couple printing towers.
Photo courtesy of MAN Roland

“We’re very excited about signing the contract to purchase these new presses for Hawaii, and we’re equally excited about moving forward with this important construction and expansion project,” said Mike Fisch, president and publisher of The Honolulu Advertiser. “We’re committed to Hawaii for the long term and this is just another example of our belief in the long-term viability of Hawaii as a place to do business.”

Scheduled to be operational in 2004, the new 147,000-square-foot production facility will be built on 11.6 acres on Kalaeloa Boulevard in Kapolei. The printing, packaging and distribution functions currently at the downtown Advertiser facility, where the 30-year-old letterpresses are located, will be moved to the new Kapolei printing plant. Business and editorial operations will remain at the historic downtown offices, which have been the site of the newspaper since 1929. That location is scheduled for renovation after the press project is completed.

The new RegioMAN presses will be manufactured at MAN Roland’s facilities in Augsburg and Plauen, Germany, and will take approximately 20 months to manufacture and install. Once installed, the presses in the new Kapolei facility will be nearly 200 feet long and more than 60 feet high.

Installed on a concrete substructure, the RegioMAN shaftless pressline will include 12 eight-couple printing towers for a total of 96 printing couples. The presses will have a 21-inch cutoff and a maximum speed of 70,000 plate cylinder revolutions per hour. The pressline will include 14 CD-13D core driven reelstands and two folder and folder superstructure arrangements — one MAN Roland combination 2:3:3/2:3:3 jaw folder, and one MAN Roland single 2:3:3 jaw folder. MAN Roland’s Pecom 2000 press control system will provide for the complete control of the presses.

The RegioMAN is designed to provide flexibility, efficiency and higher reproduction capabilities to regional newspapers. The Advertiser selected the RegioMAN after a thorough examination of many competitive products for its flexibility to handle a wide range of advertiser and reader needs.

“The RegioMAN is what we believe to be the next advanced level of printing speed and quality,” said Dennis Francis, general manager of The Advertiser. “We were favorably impressed by the MAN Roland manufacturing operation, and after considering other manufacturers worldwide, we decided the RegioMAN would be a perfect fit for our customers’ needs here in Hawaii.”

The full-color capability of the pressline brings new design and layout possibilities to increase the attractiveness of the paper for both the reader and the advertiser. The Advertiser will be able to simultaneously print two newspapers of up to 56 pages with 40 of those pages in full color and a 64-page paper with each page in full color. The various press configurations will allow The Advertiser to serve its customers effectively and maximize news deadlines and delivery times.

The new presses will give The Advertiser more variability in the layout, size and number of daily sections, expanded color printing capabilities and the ability to produce a wider variety of special sections for individual target groups. This capability also expands the applications and economic efficiency of the pressline with opportunities for producing outside jobs and supplements on improved quality papers in high print quality.

“Given today’s economic conditions, newspaper publishers demand efficient production cost,” said Vincent Lapinski, senior vice president of web operations for MAN Roland. “With the innovatively designed RegioMAN press, production managers push back makeready times, experience less plate cost and increase flexibility with color and page counts.”