Editor’s note: Newspaper Agency Corp., the joint operating agency that produces The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News, is moving full steam ahead on its construction of an $84 million facility that will house new presses, postproduction and administrative offices. With this installment, Newspapers & Technology begins following the progress of the plant, scheduled for completion in 2006.

The construction of Newspaper Agency Corp.’s new production facility in the Salt Lake suburb of West Valley City will certainly be measured as one of the more challenging projects for general contractor Layton Construction Co.

Newspaper Agency Corp.’s $84 million plant will be built around three 4-by-1 Color Top 5000 presses from TKS (USA).
Photos: Alan Rindlisbacher

“The facility is an $84 million investment in Utah’s future and in our two great newspapers,” said NAC President Harry Whipple in describing the project.

The new headquarters, complete with appealing architecture, three new presses, new packaging equipment and modern office space for more than 700 NAC associates, will be fully operational by April 2006.  

The NAC production center represents the largest installation in North America of the three state-of-the-art, 4-by-1 Color Top 5000 presses from TKS (USA).

The building, which sits on a 37-acre parcel of land, will be 319,000 square feet, including 70,000 square feet of office space spread over two stories. The presses will sit on a concrete platform 40 feet wide and 420 feet long. The three-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete pad is further supported by auger-cast pilings set 18 to 30 feet deep and tied into the pad.

Precise construction

Because of the precision required to print newspapers, Layton Project Manager Jake Greenland said construction of the tabletop was particularly critical. The pad was successfully completed in October and is almost perfectly flat, easily meeting the spec that it varies in height by no more than 1/8-inch over the length of the platform, Greenland said.

A welder putting the finishing touches on a support structure. NAC, which publishes The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News, hopes to move in next year.

The steel structure used to construct the press building, meantime, posed other challenges.

“The challenge we faced was that the steel members were so large the mill tooled up to produce that size only once every 120 days,” Greenland said. “The challenge came in coordinating production at the steel mill with our schedule.”

The building site’s soil was another obstacle.

The site was once an old gravel pit that was abandoned several years ago. There were pockets of good soil and areas of very bad soil. “We ended up moving 40,000 cubic yards of bad soil and replacing it with good soil,” Greenland said. “That was lots of work in a short time. Also, because our tolerance requirements are so strict, we’ve done more than 1,600 individual soils tests.” A normal construction project might only test 100 soil samples, he said.

Reflects legacies

As for the face NAC’s headquarters will present to the world, its architecture will reflect the stature Utah’s two leading newspapers have in the community. But it also “grows out of the physical site, so you can’t pick it up and put it anywhere else,” as architect Dario DiMare put it. His firm, Dario Designs, designed the NAC office and production facilities. As one of the main architectural themes, the facility will be shaped and tinted to replicate the mountain ranges that surround the Salt Lake Valley, and to blend back into them.

Layton Construction has been making preparations for this building for several years, with crews traveling worldwide to look at everything from press installation to press operations. NAC’s new production facility is demanding and challenging, but Layton is confident that the presses will be rolling as scheduled next year.

Editor’s note: Portions of this article previously appeared in NAC’s “Utah Business and Industry ‘04” special section and are reprinted with permission.