Competition for membership of the International Newspaper Color Quality Club 2002-2004 is now in full swing, and the lineup of participants is more international than ever.

The current competition, the fifth, is being run jointly for the third time by Ifra, the association for media publishing, the Newspaper Association of America and supported also by the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

Testing one of the INCQC 2002-2004 contestant’s entries.
Photo courtesy of Ifra

The battle for places in the INCQC 2002-2004 spreads right around the globe too, this year far wider than ever before. The judges are scrutinizing a total of 156 entries from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Panama, Poland, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Slovenia, South, Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Nether-lands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

From now until April 15 — D-Day for the return of participants’ test prints to Ifra/NAA/Panpa — whether from Iceland in the north to Australia in the south; whether in the idyllic environs of the Austrian alps or amid the cosmopolitan hubbub of New York, all 156 competitors will be facing exacting tests designed to reproduce entrants’ actual processes and workflows.

While entrants could decide previously which set of printed copies to submit, this time it’s down to the organizers to choose the three days within the competition period from which the participants have to submit seven copies of a day’s production for evaluation. The specific days will only be announced at the end of the test period. This is in addition to copies containing a supplementary INCQC test image. That means that competitors’ normal production quality must be competitive for an extended period. In other words, the competition winners will be the winners in real life, too, delivering consistent color quality to their readers and advertising customers, and the newspapers that can maintain this effort rightly deserve membership of a very exclusive club: INCQC 2002-2004 membership will be limited to the 50 highest scores.

Awards ceremony in Barcelona

The INCQC 2002-2004 members will receive their awards at IfraExpo 2002, held in Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 14-17. Barcelona, as the home of Antoni Gaudí, the architect who made the city famous worldwide at the beginning of the twentieth century, is an appropriate venue for the awards ceremony. Gaudí, like many outstanding engineers, hailed by some as a great artist, by others as a great technician, could have been paying tribute to the INCQC 2002-2004 members, when he highlighted the value of color, pointing out, “Nature does not present any object to us as monotonously uniform. In vegetation, in geology, in topography, in the animal kingdom, everything maintains a more or less vivid contrast of color; and this is why we must obligatorily color, partly or wholly, any ... member.”

Indeed, all INCQC 2002-2004 participants will be able to rejoice at competition end, whether or not they qualify for membership and make it to the Barcelona awards ceremony. Each and every one of them will receive a comprehensive individual evaluation report on their performance, enabling them to install improved quality control measures for future production.

Third QUIZ week at Ifra

In this respect, it need hardly be said that Ifra’s research and consulting expertise is not merely confined to the INCQC 2002-2004, but extends to all aspects of the newspaper production process. Also this coming April, for example, in conjunction with the German newspaper marketing association (ZMG), Ifra will be hosting the third QUIZ week (the German language acronym for Quality Initiative in Newspaper Printing) to test the ISO 12647-3 newspaper printing standard in practice. Under the maxim “Not to aim to print better than standard but to use the standard to print better,” 50 German newspapers have already worked in the first two QUIZ project rounds in 2000 and 2001 on the implementation of a uniform color printing standard. The third round, to be held at Ifra in Darmstadt, Germany, April 15-19 will take this work further.

For further details about the International Newspaper Color Quality Club 2002-2004 contact Andy Williams, research engineer, by fax +49 61.51.73.38.00 or email: willliams@ifra.com.

For further information about the third round of QUIZ, to be held at Ifra in Darmstadt, Germany, April 22-26, contact Manfred Werfel, director of research and consulting at Ifra by fax +49 61.51.73.38.00 or email at werfel@ifra.com.

For print quality graphics, please contact Donald Phillips, Ifra’s public relations manager at +49 61.51.73.39.25 or e-mail phillips@ifra.com.