Almost a year after the Butler (Pa.) Eagle formally commissioned its customized Uniliner press from Goss International Corp., the daily is on track to print more commercial work on the machine.

“It’s working out well,” said Eagle Publisher Vernon Wise Jr., the driving force behind the Eagle’s decision to work with Goss to design a double-wide press that blends heatset, coldset and multiple web widths in a single pressline.

The Eagle is the first U.S. newspaper to deploy such a hybrid press, which anchors the paper’s 80,000-square-foot Eagle Production Center.

Wise wanted a press that would not only print the afternoon Eagle (daily, 28,782; Sunday, 30,566) but also support the family’s commercial printing operation, Butler Color Press.

“At this stage of the game (the Uniliner) serves as an overflow for Butler Color,” Wise said. “They also have a 66-inch press, so in effect (the Uniliner) gives us twin presslines and twin backup.”

The Eagle’s press includes two towers and a two-high with a 50-inch web width plus one tower with a 66-inch width. The 50-inch units are used to print the Eagle and other commercial newspaper jobs while the other tower feeds into a heatset dryer. The machine also boasts two 2:3:3 jaw folders with quarter folders that can be used for other commercial projects.

“We’re running a lot of impressions” on both sides of the press, Wise said, for both commercial accounts as well as for newspapers seeking additional press capacity. “We have a lot of accounts and a lot of people are looking at what we’re doing,” he said.

“It’s a different way to go at things,” he said about the hybrid press. “We don’t make as much money (on the heatset side) as we do from the newspaper side, but it’s growing.”

The Eagle’s efforts to mine more commercial work from its offset press mirror steps taken by many dailies to increase their non-newspaper revenue.

“Newspaper printers and publishers are nowadays seeking to run their presses longer hours, both on their own newspaper and other third-party products,” said David Stamp, Goss’ global director of marketing. The revenues collected from printing outside products “obviously improves bottom-line profitability and boosts the utilization of both staff and facilities,” he said.

Stamp said about 20 percent of Goss’ Universal presses installed worldwide have one or more heatset webs. The majority of these dual-purpose presses are located at papers in Europe and Asia, but American newspaper publishers are also examining the trend to see how they might profit, he said.

“The opportunity to do it technically is already there. Is there the business interest and customer desire to make it happen? The market will decide,” Stamp said.

More color, more greenbacks

By  Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

When it comes to commercial printing, newspaper publishers realize that the more color they can offer, the better.

That’s the case for both Gannett Co. Inc.’s Middle Tennessee Community Newspaper Group and the Watertown (Wis.) Daily Times, both of which installed presses from Web Press Corp. in a bid to build their commercial accounts.

Gannett installed a Web Press Quad-Stack printing unit for one of its publications, The News Examiner in Gallatin, Tenn., in January, according to Judi Terzotis, general manager of MTCNG. The group publishes six community papers, three shoppers and two niche publications.

Adding the new press will help maximize press windows, Terzotis said. “We currently run two shifts Monday through Thursday and one shift on Sunday evenings,” she said.

The new Quad-Stack will help sway commercial contracts that demand more color, she said. “Although the equipment has just been installed, we believe it will definitely drive additional commercial business,” Terzotis said. “In the past few years we have been turned down by commercial print customers because we couldn’t provide as many color options as our principal print competitors.”

The Quad-Stack’s variable web width, meanwhile, will also help. The News Examiner will now be able to print products ranging in size from 25 inches to 34 inches.

The News Examiner’s largest commercial customer is a 30,000-copy weekly shopper with a folio of between 36 to 44 pages.

But Terzotis said The News Examiner also snagged a contract with a local university to print its tri-weekly student newspaper. “We have 14 commercial contracts and print two to four miscellaneous jobs per month. Our commercial division definitely produces higher profits,” she said.

In addition to the new press, the daily also expanded its inserting line to accommodate growing preprint volume. Although the upgrade wasn’t a direct result of The News Examiner’s commercial printing, the subsequent boost in capacity will give commercial clients more options, Terzotis said.

More icing on the cake

The Daily Times, meanwhile, has had its Quad-Stack for a little more than a year, said Kevin Clifford, general manager.

The paper bought the new press to add more color capacity and to buttress its existing Goss Community pressline, Clifford said. The Quad-Stack’s 100-inch height easily fit under the 12-foot ceilings in the Daily Times’ pressroom.

“The equipment has brought in some jobs that we couldn’t have done with our old configuration just for the fact we can do more color,” he said.

“We always look for a commercial job that will fit our schedule. Our first priority is our newspapers ... we only have one pressline so we don’t have a lot of capacity unlike some other bigger newspapers.”

To that end, the Daily Times’ commercial accounts primarily consist of short-run products, with runs of 20,000 or fewer, Clifford said.

But the Quad-Stack has also enabled the Daily Times to offer advertisers four-page color tabs, he said.

Clifford said that newspapers looking towards upgrading their press foundations should determine what they want to get out of their new presses, and whether their priorities will be more commercial work or better-looking newspapers.

“Commercial work is something extra,” he said. “We have turned down jobs that we knew we couldn’t handle because of our schedule for printing our newspaper.”