By Ryan Olson
Assistant Editor

The rainbow effect is a term used to describe the potentially large degree of variation in newsprint shade from mill to mill and region to region, throughout the country. Large publications, receiving paper from many suppliers, have to work hard to ensure that their end product looks the same, no matter where it is printed or where the paper supply comes from. Ensuring uniformity between suppliers can sometimes be difficult, and end users have struggled to find an easy way to make this happen.

With all newsprint suppliers not making use of the same equipment, even with the same L*a*b* measurement system it can be expected that variations will exist between mills, and they do. Different machines turn out different readings, even though the L*a*b* system was designed to provide relative uniformity of color and be device independent. Hoping to make the overall process of attaining newsprint shade uniformity a bit easier, the Newspaper Association of America has introduced its Shade Tolerance Card, a device designed to provide both newspapers and newsprint manufacturers with a visual reference point from which to go forward and obtain acceptable newsprint shades.

WHAT’S NEW IN NEWSPRINT: (l-r) John D’Alessandro, manager of production materials for the Newspaper Association of America; Paul Cousineau, director of continuous process improvement for Dow Jones & Co; James Harrison, director of quality assurance for Bowater America Inc.; and Dave Keenan, technical services department head for Abiti Consolidated Sales Corp., discuss the use of NAA’s Newsprint Shade Tolerance Card during a panel discussion at SuperConference held in Phoenix in January.

The goal was to develop a reference point for newsprint shade and increase consistency of newsprint shade throughout the country, explained John D’Alessandro, manager of production materials technology at the Newspaper Association of America. Developed by the Joint Newsprint Technical Steering Group, a technical arm of NAA’s Newsprint Committee, the project saw representation from seven newspapers and seven newsprint manufacturers.

“This is not a replacement for the numbers. This augments the numbers. That is the important issue here,” D’Alessandro explained. “I don’t want people to think that we’re throwing numbers away and using a subjective system. However, subjective is not that bad, because we’re really looking at a shade, and shade is a human visual response. We need to get that involved in the process somewhere, and once we determine what it is that we have, then we follow the numbers.”

Introduced at Nexpo 2001 in New Orleans, the Shade Tolerance Card has seen “phenomenal” interest, according to D’Alesandro. “[It is] kind of like a first high school dance. You’ve got everyone on the sidelines waiting for someone to start dancing first, and that’s the situation … that we have now. While the interest has been high, there seems to be reluctance and apprehension to move forward with it. They want to make sure that everyone understands it.”

Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s weekly news magazine, among other smaller publications, decided to make use of the Shade Tolerance Card in their newsprint evaluation system and has been working to integrate the product since Jan. 1.

“We get newsprint from a lot of mills, and the thing is that we’re printing one product, The Wall Street Journal. Our customers are not interested in the unique variability of color from mill to mill,” explained Paul Cousineau, director of continuous process improvement. “We had specs which were basically similar to some of the other specs in the industry that were based on L*a*b*, and they were specs that we would order the newsprint by. The Shade Tolerance Card … is a good standard for us [to use] to try to drive some of that variability out, so we’re working with our newsprint suppliers to do that.”

Currently in the initial phases of data acquisition and vendor evaluation, Dow Jones is one of the first companies to use NAA’s card as an accessory tool.

“We incorporated the newsprint shade card into our newsprint specifications, which we communicated to all of the vendors,” explained Bill Harmer, director of production planning and operations support at Dow Jones. “We previously had specifications for basis weight, moisture, etc., and we used L*a*b*, but there are some problems with that system, just trying to use it across multiple locations. That’s why the committee, which was composed of newsprint suppliers and users decided that the shade card made more sense as a starting point, after which the L*a*b* could be used by the individual mills to come up with their own numbers.”

As mentioned, the final implementation of the shade card at Dow Jones has yet to be determined, although it will definitely see use.

“We’re trying to get the data on the samples that we collect from the plants, and it’s probably a little bit too early to say exactly how everything is going to work out. Our intent has been to publicize to the mills and the vendors that that’s going to be our spec, and we want them to match it,” Harmer explained.

It would appear that what both NAA and industry players are hoping for is an ideal fit for NAA’s card into a system in which it can work harmoniously with existing computer color and shade measuring equipment.

“The important thing is not the shade, which people tend to focus on, but whether we can get consistent shade, and once we can determine that we can get consistent shade across the country — mill to mill, shipment to shipment,” D’Alessandro explained. “Then we can decide ‘Well, is this the shade we really want as an industry?’ That can be changed at any time. The point is that we have to find out if this whole process will work, as it did in our testing.”

Making reference to a point he made at the recent SuperConference in Phoenix, D’Alessandro compared the use of L*a*b* equipment and different newsprint suppliers to the use of 10 different scales on which to weigh a single person.

“They’re not going to weigh the same. At the most you will get 10 different numbers, and there are different measurement devices at each one of those mills, and what the common denominator becomes is a reference, and that’s what the shade card is,” he concluded.

“I think that everybody would like this thing to work,” Harmer said, “So that this whole issue of rainbow effects and shade variation either goes away or just becomes much more manageable.”