French national daily newspaper Le Monde ordered a Wifag OF 370 press comprising six four-high towers, seven autopasters, two turner-bar towers, four balloon formers and a 2 :5 :5 folder. The control and production management systems will be supplied by ABB Inc.

Le Monde already has two Wifag OF 7 presses and the startup of the new press is planned for June 2003. The new printing press will reduce the load on the two existing OF 7s and will correspond to the requirements of new customers.

Cambridge Newspapers Ltd. signed a contract with Atex Media Solutions to install a Prestige editorial system for content management, pagination and Web output.

The U.K. publisher of the Cambridge Evening News and 10 weekly publications expects the 82-seat installation to improve the efficiency of the news operations and strengthen the Internet publishing efforts of the century-old newspaper.

Seinet recently launched a new campaign to grow its international business. The company has established several agreements with best-in-class regional integrators starting with IPA Systems France and Mediasystemen B.V. of the Netherlands. This will be followed by announcements in the United Kingdom and the United States. Seinet has also recently hired an experienced international sales and marketing team to further develop these markets.

IPA is an integrator of multi-channel publishing processes that implement comprehensive editorial solutions for newspapers. Over the term of the agreement, IPA expects that 80 percent of the software they sell will be Seinet’s Xtent Publishing Suite.

Roularta Media Group, a Belgium-based publishing company, selected Atomik for all of its QuarkXPress-to-XML conversion. Atomik will assist in the company’s cross-media publishing strategies by making it possible to automatically reformat the content from QuarkXPress to electronic media including the Web and CD-ROM.

Atomik is being set up at Roularta Media Group headquarters and used by a number of publications.s

Krause expanded its presence in Asia, announcing its 50th computer-to-plate installation in the region.

The first Asian installation was in 1994 in South Korea where Krause installed nearly 40 newspaper systems.

The biggest daily newspapers, Chosun Ilbo, Kyung Hyang, Joongang Ilbo and Hankoyreh Shinmun are already working with the second generation of machines produced by the company.

These machines are fulfilling the special requirements for the handling of the towel format of printing plates longer than 1,100 millimeters.

The Times of India placed an order for four lines including nine punch benders in February for its printing sites in Delhi and Mumbai.

Finally, two LS Jet CTP lines are expected to be commissioned at Jiefang Daily in China.

Mediasystemen B.V. and Azzurro B.V., two advertising system companies in the Netherlands, recently announced a strategic alliance to combine their products and services for the newspaper and magazine market.

Azzurro is supplier of the software suite Pharoz, which is aimed at the administrative part of advertising. Mediasystemen focuses on advertising page production and planning.

The Shenzhen Te Que Bao newspaper in Shenzhen, China purchased a DiamondSetter 610SP-100-laser platesetter and related equipment.

These products were sold and will be serviced by Ekpac Graphics Ltd., the exclusive distributor for Western Lithotech in Hong Kong and China.

Shenzhen Te Que Bao produces more than 1 million newspaper copies per day in full color. The company also owns and prints the Hong Kong Commercial Daily.

The Augsburger Allgemeine in Augsburg, Germany, purchased its third DiamondSetter CTP platesetter, a 610S2P.

The Augsburger Allgemeine serves cities in Bavaria via 17 regional editions.

LexixNexis has contracted with Televisual to provide the company with its information structuring services so it is possible for them to add millions of documents each week to its database.

LexisNexis is one of the leading providers of news, business information and market intelligence with 3.1 billion documents from 31,000 sources of reference online.

Much of the information provided by LexisNexis is used for its various news services. The news stories originate from newspapers and magazines. While some publishers are able to supply this content in a form suitable for online publishing, many are not.

Televisual takes the DTP data produced by the newspaper or magazine, selects and marks keywords for fast and accurate retrieval purposes and converts it into structured text suitable for use in online archives and Web sites.

Swedish print enterprise VLT Press in Västeräs, Sweden, west of Stockholm, has ordered a Comet and Continent press from KBA. The two presses will be installed in an extension to the existing building. VLT Press, employing around 140 people, prints up to 15 different titles per day. Set to ship next year, the 70,000 cph Comet will have a cylinder circumference of 44 in (1,120 mm) and a maximum web width of 31 1/4 in (795 mm). The press package for the Continent will have a 22 in (560 mm) cut-off and maximum web width of 31 1/4 in (795 mm).

Each press will be controlled from four consoles. To streamline the production workflow and increase net output, the installation will include EAE’s Print 4 job preparation and press presetting system, RIP interfaces, service and diagnostic PCs, automatic ink supply and automatic dust extractors.

The media group Rheinische Post set up two new print plants in Prague and Ölmütz to strengthen their print products MF Dnes and Lidové Noviny, and enhancing color print capabilities within their project DNES 2000+. The group installed two Krause computer-to-plate systems at each location.

The Netherlands publishing group signed a contract with Atex Media Solutions to replace its aging advertising system with a 300-seat Atex Enterprise system.

The new advertising order entry and production system expects to serve the needs of the publishing group’s four daily newspapers the Leeuwarder Courant, Drentse Courant, Groninger Dagblad and Nieuwsblad along with several weeklies that the publishing group publishes.

Atex’s customer support group should finish phase one by early 2002. That portion of the project includes software for classified order entry, invoice management and sales contract to be completed early 2002. Half of the 300 seats will be installed at sites remote from the newspapers’ main office.

The Netherlands publishing group is the sixth European publishing company in as many months to choose Atex Enterprise as their advertising solution.

The Press Association, the national news agency in the United Kingdom and Ireland selected to install two modules, Newsjaz and Webjaz from Harris Publishing System to deliver content to their customers.

Newsjaz will be used as the editorial system to supply around-the-clock news coverage and Webjaz will be used to manage the content of the Press Association’s Web products.

The Press Association supplies a continuous stream of stories, pictures and other media-related products into newsrooms of all national papers and 95 percent of broadcasters in the United Kingdom and Ireland. More than 400 journalists are involved in the Press Association’s news gathering and editorial process.

Once installed, the Press Association will use Newsjaz with Quark for Macintosh for its daily national wire page production and the weekly sports publications. It will use Newsjaz with InDesign for Windows for its London press Service publications.

ABB agreed to supply the MPS workflow system for two publishing companies in France.

The two publishing groups receiving the order are Le Télégramme de Brest, Morlaix, a publisher who produces 18 editions daily with a total circulation of 250,000 and L’Alsace publishes 14 editions daily with a total circulation of 140,000.

The package for Le Télégramme included a Hermes editorial system, three APS 3850 CIF units, one CIP from KPG and two OF370 GTD presses from Wifag. The new MPS workflow system is need to support the format change from typically 32 pages broadsheet to 64 pages tabloid in March 2002.

The order for L’Alsace is a combination of two projects: the automation of their existing press and workflow system. The process consists of a Datox editorial system with page planning; two Agfa Polaris 100 Ls violet CIP and two Wifag OF9.2 presses which will be expanded by two shaftless ad-on towers in spring 2002. The former printer’s desks will be replaced by MPS control consoles and expanded by Softproof units and MPS production from ABB. ABB’s workflow solution is based on the cooperation with ProImage Ltd. and combines the competence of two of the leading companies from one supplier.

La Voz de Galicia chose Smart Layout and Smart Styles from WoodWing Software. With the two software programs, La Voz de Galicia opted for an InDesign-based system with the layout efficiency usually found in high-end proprietary newspaper systems.

Smart Layout adds the article concepts to Adobe InDesign and additional intelligent behavior and automation for articles. Smart Styles adds high-level object styles to InDesign to quickly format complete page items including different text styles.

The WoodWing plug-ins are integrated in Schlumberger Sema’s Digital & Media Press solution. DMP integrates market-leading solutions such as Adobe InDesign, InCopy, SQL Server and Oracle on any client or server platform.

Besides Smart Layout and Smart Styles, WoodWing also supplied additional technology for the DMP system including Smart XML technology for easy cross-media publishing, zoning functionality and desktop integration.