The largest tower addition press expansion
project in the United States to date is at Dow Jones & Co., which added two
4/4 towers to each of its existing 10 Goss and nine TKS presslines at 17
locations throughout the country.
The project started in mid-1998 and
was targeted for completion by the end of January 2002. The new towers were
ready for commercial use slightly ahead of schedule and under budget, by
November 2001. The new towers, which were added to the right end of each
pressline, were used in live production of The Wall Street Journal (Monday –
Friday, 1.78 million) beginning with the Jan. 2, 2002 edition.
The publisher asked the press
vendors to bid the project as a whole, as well as to bid it just adding towers
to its own presses. Dow Jones opted to keep its presslines homogeneous, adding
Goss Newsliner towers to its Goss Metro and Metroliner presses, and adding TKS
ColorTop 6000 towers to its TKS M-72 presses.
“The picture one had from the
proposals provided by Goss and TKS clearly demonstrated that they were much more
comfortable and capable of [adding towers to] their own (presses), as opposed to
doing their own plus the other supplier’s,” said Michael Sheehan, vice
president of production for The Wall Street Journal. “Each [company] bid on
everything, but we were just not satisfied that either one could do the whole
thing as well as each supplier could handle tying the towers into its own
existing press equipment.”
Step one in the project was to
upgrade several aspects of the press systems, including installing new press
electrical controls and AC motor drives from ABB Inc. along the horizontal drive
line that the towers were later tied into.
“When we were upgrading our press
systems … we put in the new motors for electrical efficiency and also to have
the power to drive the expanded presses,” Sheehan explained. “The press has
expanded from 80 pages straight to 96 pages straight. Pre-expansion, we only had
eight color positions when we were running straight, and now we have 24 with the
expanded press.”
Dow Jones wanted to use proven
technology for the ink train and the inking systems, and elected to replace the
pre-existing mechanical page packs on the Goss presses and the segmented open
fountain inkers on the TKS presses with digital page packs rather than a keyless
inking system to match the inking systems on the new towers.
The other aspect of the press
expansion and upgrade was to unify the press configuration of all 19 presses,
some of which had a different number of units and different angle bar
configurations. Without having the same configuration on all its presses, Dow
Jones was limited in the section splits and the color positioning in The Wall
Street Journal to whatever the least capable press was able to produce.
“We made our presses so that they
are standard from site to site with respect to number of web leads and type of
web leads left and right of the folder … so that it gave us much more
flexibility in how we design the issues across the entire country,” Sheehan
said. “We wanted to maximize the flexibility that we had in day-to-day issue
design and the only way you can do that consistently was to make sure you have
the same press configuration at each site.”
Although at one point all 17 plants
were under some state of construction, production of The Wall Street Journal was
never interrupted.
“With the work we had to do on
getting the configurations uniform, we never lost the ability to print at a
plant, we never lost page capacity, we never missed an issue and we never had to
reduce our color page capacity throughout the entire project,” Sheehan stated.
Dow Jones expects the press
expansion project to satisfy the needs of its national advertisers, creating a
healthy return on investment for the company.
“Advertisers have taken advantage
of color as an option to use when presenting their message … and this project
positions The Journal to offer its customers more color advertising options if
and when their campaigns require the use of color to be effective,” Sheehan
said.
