To use an old cliche The Dallas Morning News replaced its color management system in nearly the blink of an eye.

One of the largest newspapers in the Lone Star State upgraded its color measurement system with X-Rite’s auto-tracking densitometer systems.

The Dallas Morning News purchased eight ATD News 2 systems to be used in each quiet room. Each ATD News 2 system comes with a touch-screen monitor allowing users direct selection of page and measurement identification.
Photo courtesy of X-Rite

The Dallas Morning News (Monday-Thursday, 511,159; Friday, 587,515; Saturday, 545,548; Sunday, 776,868) a Belo Corp. publication, purchased eight ATD News 2 densitometers to measure its color quality systems. The Dallas Morning News said it purchased ATD News 2 after it proved to be reliable during a test period at the newspaper.

“Pressmen [at The Morning News] didn’t always have faith in the handheld units,” said Bill May, production manager of quality at The Morning News. “But using the ATD News 2 in a trial period, we were able to demonstrate to them how reliable the machines could be.”

X-Rite’s ATD News 2 automates color evaluation in newspaper print production. The system measures and reports density levels from continuous-color rules as small as one-sixteenth of an inch high.

Each ATD News 2 system comes with a touch-screen monitor, allowing users direct selection of page and measurement identification. ATD News displays a graphical color gauge for each ink zone on press, showing the density values compared to target values. The display indicates when color is out of balance and needs adjustment.

May said a machine will be placed in each quiet room, on each press, and will be available for press crews to use in order to set ink.

The Morning News has to train over 200 press workers and some initial calibration steps still need to be completed. Each of the eight presses at The Morning News will have ATD News 2 after one of the machines returns from the training facility.

“The Morning News has been using graybars as a part of our system for several years. In the past, we have used handheld densitometers and in their opinion felt it had a few problems, they were not very consistent, prone to calibration error and now were obsolete,” May said.

May said it is imperative that The Morning News maintain a certain level of consistency and accuracy for all their advertising clients.

“As new tools become available, we must evaluate their ability to help us manage our process and implement those that prove to be the most cost effective and beneficial,” he said. “This latest addition to our toolbox would be welcome regardless of the economic climate, because it can clearly make our job easier, allowing us to maintain proper focus on the total product.”

DMN results

Total revenue at The Dallas Morning News for the second quarter was down 3.3 percent with advertising revenue down 4.1 percent.

Dunia A. Shive, Belo Corp’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, felt that the third quarter should be better for its newspaper group.

“In the Newspaper Group, we currently expect revenue in the third quarter to increase slightly versus the prior year after adjusting for one less Sunday in the third quarter of 2002,” she said. “We expect modest improvement in classified employment volume decline in the third quarter.”

ATD News is a spectrally based, automated densitometer for newspaper print operations. Other major newspapers that have chosen ATD News 2 include The Wall Street Journal, The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel and The Des Moines (Iowa) Register.

“The Dallas Morning News runs an enormous amount of color, and I think we have a reputation for doing a good job managing that volume,” May said. “If we were to lose regard for color management, or color reproduction we would also lose our position of respect in the industry, and eventually revenue.”

ATD News includes three modules for system setup, operation and reporting. The Settings Tool allows a pressroom manager to establish target values for various types of runs, the Press Tool scans and records data and The Reporting Tool exports data from the scans in most spreadsheet and analysis packages formats.