In what seems like a very long time ago, USA Today burst upon the scene and changed newspapers not just in the United States, but also influenced newspapers worldwide.

The color weather map can now be found throughout the world and newspaper presses purchased around the globe have more color printing capacity than those they replace. When USA Today was launched in the early ’80s, color was not a regular part of most newspapers. In fact, some publishers felt that you could not be a “serious” newspaper if you used color on the front page. Tabloids used color, the reasoning went; therefore, if you use color, you cannot be a serious journalistic endeavor.

Advertisers had all but given up on running national ads in color. They had become tired of seeing their expensively prepared ads printed as blue hams and green beer when it was not St. Patrick’s Day.

Prior to 1982, some of the more progressive newspapers purchased presses with the intention of printing page one in color, but in most cases, spot color was the norm if color was used. In the course of a decade starting in 1982, newspaper design went from spot color-centered to process color-centered.

Press design shifted from half decks that could put one color on a web to four units stacked on top of each other, called towers, that printed four colors on each side of the web. Color capacity has steadily increased on new presses ordered. Year after year the color positions have increased to the point that many can place color on any page.

The tower press came out of the USA Today group when it was seeking a press faster than the Urbanite to print process color without running Dilito (directly printing one color on a web) or running from unit to unit. The concept grew into the Goss Colorliner. This concept developed so rapidly that the first several press orders were based in part on a plywood mockup of a unit.

Now newspaper press design is standardized on tower presses. It has taken fewer than 20 years from the introduction of a four-color tower in high-speed presses for the worldwide industry to make the tower design the de facto press design.

Color capacity was so limited at most newspapers in the ’70s and ’80s that if the advertising department sold a full-page color ad, editorial lost color on a section front, and maybe even page one. A few old newspapers will take color away from editorial if they need it for advertising, but they are a shrinking number.

Printing large numbers of process color pages, printing them well — at more than 30 locations — is the hallmark of USA Today. To state the obvious: It is more difficult to print well and to the same standard on multiple presses than one press. I doubt that anyone would disagree with that statement. The real challenge, to meet the advertiser’s demands, is to print well and consistently on one press or across multiple presses.

This need to meet advertisers’ color quality demands has led to several approaches to quality control on the printing press. Setting ink to a graybar is gaining in usage and increasing on advertising pages. USA Today used solid bars, but many newspapers did not want to resemble USA Today. The graybar on page one evolved to fill the need for a visual reference and one that could be measured with a densitometer.

Most editors agree to use the bars, but advertising departments have been reluctant to use them for fear of offending the advertisers or taking away space from the ad. However, that is starting to change as we see usage on the advertising pages as well, which improves the reproduction results.

The bars are valuable because they quickly show if the ink is set correctly and is in balance. In conjunction with press presetting, this is an excellent way to fine-tune the color. Graybars take the judgement out of setting color, as there is only one way to set it — gray. A densitometer measurement determines if the visual and actual measurements are correct.

Probably one of the best features of the graybar is that it reduces conversation and finger pointing about poor color reproduction. If the bar is gray, then the press operators have done their job. If the reproduction is not acceptable, then it most likely is a prepress problem. If the bar looks blue, assuming the pictures look blue, then it is a press problem.

We tell the publishers that this is a great tool for them, as they can become experts at determining if the press or prepress is the problem. As the industry has come to rely more and more on process color and has implemented quality control measures, green beer has become a distant memory, except, of course on St. Patrick’s Day. And that is progress.

Chuck Blevins is the chief executive officer of Chuck Blevins & Associates, an international process and equipment consulting firm. He can be reached at 703.883.2200 or via e-mail at CRBlevins@aol.com.