The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will purchase three five-color KBA Colormax units to complement its existing pressline.

The Post-Gazette (daily, 243,000; Sunday, 424,000) will ultimately consolidate its seven presses, a mix of KBA and Hoe equipment, into five refurbished and upgraded presses, each containing two flexo units, according to Dave Beihoff, the newspaper’s vice president and general manager.

Delivery is expected early next year, with installation to be completed by 2005. The newspaper also plans to upgrade and renovate its existing mailroom.

“We have an excellent relationship with KBA,” said Beihoff, explaining why the Post-Gazette returned to KBA to purchase the additional units.

The Post-Gazette completed installation of its first seven five-color Colormax printing units in 1997. Each unit was added to the newspaper’s seven existing presses. The units allowed the newspaper to print 52 flexographic color pages in addition to letterpress color previously in use throughout the newspaper. With the three new units, the Post-Gazette will be able to produce up to eight additional pages of process color flexo per press, according to KBA.

Meantime, the Post-Gazette also upgraded its front-end systems through the purchase of a 269-seat NewsSpeed editorial system from Digital Technology International. The installation will start this month and should be completed in September, according to DTI.

NewsSpeed consists of SpeedWriter for text editing and PageSpeed for page design and layout.

A total of 211 reporters will be equipped with SpeedWriter, providing them with editing, hyphenation and justification and layout tracking features of Adobe InCopy 2.0. Approximately 60 editors will use PageSpeed, which employs Adobe InDesign 2.0 as its primary design tool.

The software will allow Post-Gazette designers to use XML tags and templates to automate story pagination. These features will allow properly tagged articles to place themselves automatically into pre-formatted page templates, according to DTI.