When it came time for USA Today to replace the
prepress network at its five international print sites, the Gannett flagship
wanted to implement equipment that could be supported internationally.
“I didn’t want to use a company to support it
that was far away,” said Ken Kirkhart, vice president of operations for USA
Today. “I wanted something very reliable that could be serviced from a
European manufacturer.”
During the same time, USA Today was also in the
process of implementing computer-to-plate workflows at its U.S. print sites, but
could not justify the cost of implementing CTP at the international sites.
“The justification, the labor savings was not
there for the international sites, so we went for the less expensive filmsetters
that we knew were reliable, they ran very well and being so far away from it
wouldn’t strain our ability to support it,” Kirkhart said.
USA Today chose Purup-Eskofot and installed two
DotMate 7500P film imagesetters at each of its international print sites in
Milan, London, Frankfurt, Brussels and Hong Kong. After looking at several
vendors, the newspaper chose Purup-Eskofot based on the size and format imaging
capabilities of the DotMates.
“We were looking for throughput, size and
reliability. We had already had a DotMate here (in the United States) for USA
Today and it was a workhorse and never broke down,” Kirkhart said. “We had
one problem in five years — and conversely, we had some other imagesetters
here that the transporters kept jamming on, and we just had a lot of problems
with them over the years. We wanted something reliable and that’s how we ended
up going with Purup-Eskofot.”
The “workhorse” DotMate in the United States
ran for six or seven years before USA Today had to replace a motor, which
Kirkhart said was a very simple procedure.
The DotMate 7500Ps were up and running at all
five of the commercial print sites by March 2000 to produce the English-language
international editions of the paper each day.
The DotMate 7500P is a 4-up internal-drum
imagesetter with resolutions from 1,200 to 3,600 dots per inch and 15 individual
spot sizes from 8 microns to 25 microns. It has an imaging speed of 484 square
inches per minute at 2,540 dots per inch. Speed is optimized by turning the
imagesetting format 90 degrees.
Page makeup is created at USA Today in McLean,
Va., with a CCI Europe editorial system and Apple Macintosh computers for
advertising. Pages are sent via satellite to the five international sites. USA
Today uses software from ProImage to merge 64-bit TIFF files at the domestic
sites and then assemble full pages and image plates directly. A separate
satellite system sends the international edition to the DotMate 7500P
imagesetters. Film is then output, plates are exposed and then sent to the
press.
USA Today’s international editions used to be a
re-done version of yesterday’s national edition, but with the DotMates that
has changed.
Because of the proof throughput with the
imagesetters, the newspaper is able to do more in a smaller time window. They
have actually changed the transmission window for international so it is now the
forerunner to the national edition.
“We’ve pushed the cycle back and the paper we
put out there for today will be the same paper we’re going to put out tonight
for domestic, except domestic will be updated because we have later closes on
that,” Kirkhart said. “So instead of yesterday’s rehash, it’s today’s
start, which we think improves the product both for international and
domestically.”
Currently, USA Today has no plans to add more
international print sites, but Kirkhart said the newspaper has been considering
other ways of printing, such as using PDF, which would allow the paper to get to
more locations without having to add more imagesetters.
“There is demand all over,” he said. “Right
now, those print sites serve all of Europe and the British Isles, so the
geography that each site covers is pretty great. We always think there are
places we can’t reach in a timely manner and that we would do better if we
could, but without adding print sites, which are expensive, how do we get there?
So that’s what we’re looking at.”
