SALT LAKE CITY - Robert Burns has a simply articulated goal: “to have the most modern and efficient production plant in the United States.”

Burns, senior vice president of operations at Newspaper Agency Corp., the MediaNews Group/Deseret Morning News Publishing Co.-owned entity that publishes The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News, now has most of the tools necessary to make that goal a reality.

Having those tools is one thing. Making those tools play well together is the next challenge Burns and NAC managers must face.

“I am proud of this facility and must credit everyone who worked hard to make this a success,” he said.

As Burns moves his 6-foot, 7-inch frame through the 341,000 square feet that is NAC’s new plant and administrative facility in suburban Salt Lake City, everything he points to, from modest workstation to multimillion-dollar press, is just out of the packing crate.

“Every one of our departments has all-new technology,” he said.

The $88 million dollar facility, designed by Dario Designs Inc., is built around three shaftless Color Top 4-by-1 5000UD presses from TKS (USA). NAC is the first newspaper printer in the world to install a 4-by-1 TKS machine, in which only one plate goes around a cylinder. It’s also the biggest newspaper publisher to employ the design, which solely supports straight production.

First press of its kind

“It’s the first press of this kind in the world,” Burns said. “People will be coming here to learn how to use it. We like the 4-by-1 design. We save plate expense by using 50 percent fewer plates than a conventional newspaper press and we get good copy quicker.”

Webs whoosh through one of three TKS (USA)
4-by-1 presses anchoring NAC’s $88 million
production plant. NAC began printing at the
plant in March and planned to shut down its
old downtown production facility for good this month.
Photos: Newspapers & Technology
 

So far, so good. NAC went on-edition with its first press in March, bringing on-stream the other two machines over the last several months.

The 70,000-copy-per-hour presses include 111 printing couples with open fountain inking, 24 core drive RTPs with automatic loading and three T-NPC press control consoles. Each machine is equipped with a single heavy-duty 2:5:5 jaw folder, Oxy-Dry automatic blanket washers, technotrans spraybar dampening systems, MacDermid Inc. blankets and a QuadTech Inc. color guidance registration system.

NAC selected FMC Technologies and Machine Design Service International to provide the automated newsprint roll handling and US Ink and Flint Group to supply color and high-strength black ink, respectively.

NAC’s 2003 purchase of TKS’ technology was a coup for the vendor, which subsequently sold other presses to Fort Wayne (Ind.) Newspapers and The Frederick (Md.) News-Post.

“TKS is very pleased to have this partnership with NAC,” said Gregory Harabin, president and chief executive officer of TKS (USA). “With this installation we will be able to showcase our technology for press design and a different approach for the 4-by-1 market.”

Burns methodically transferred printing from NAC’s cramped and aged downtown facility to the new presses, keeping the publisher’s old Goss units in production as backup. There was only one significant glitch, Burns said, in the early morning hours of March 14 when production of certain sections of both dailies was delayed because of a rash of web breaks.

Shutting down old plant

“The press commissioning has gone very well,” he said. “We had breaks on that one production run, but that was due to a combination of software and alignment issues and we quickly made adjustments. We took the learnings from the first press and applied them to the startup of the second and third presses.

“For the second press,” which went into production in mid-April, “we didn’t even do a test run,” Burns said.

“We performed some (Specifications for Newsprint Advertising Production) testing, but that’s about it. We wanted to see how it ran and it ran well from the startup. Same with the third press,” which went on-edition in early May.

By the beginning of June, Burns said he expected to shut down the old downtown presses for good, leaving only a single Goss Urbanite at a satellite facility to print USA Today. Production of the Gannett Co. Inc. title will shift to the new building this fall after NAC adds color capacity to one of its three machines.

Both The Tribune (daily, 131,711; Sunday, 151,422) and the Deseret Morning News (daily, 75,453; Sunday, 76,579) are already benefiting from the new presses, taking advantage of NAC’s new color and sectioning capabilities. A redesigned Tribune, expected later this spring, will further showcase NAC’s printing resources.

The presses can produce 28 full-color pages in a 64-page, six-section production run. Both papers slimmed down to 48-inch web widths, 21-inch cutoffs and lighter-weight newsprint with the introduction of the new plant.

Papers core focus

For now, Burns said, NAC will concentrate solely on printing the papers and associated products such as a real estate guide, auto guide and TV books. It also launched a Spanish-language publication, Fronteras, and it prints the 16,000-copy daily newspaper for the University of Utah.

Robert Burns, senior vice president of operations,
with copies of The Salt Lake Tribune and
Deseret Morning News.

In the event NAC does want to add print capacity to handle future work, the pressline is designed with three vacant footprints to accommodate towers and other associated components.

More than 500 managers, designers, ad sales reps and other administrative personnel moved to the new plant last fall, taking up about 100,000 square feet of office space. Production staffers made the shift earlier this year. Editorial employees of the two dailies remain downtown.

“It’s definitely a culture change,” Burns said of the new facility. “Before, we were scattered in multiple locations. Now we are coalesced into one. And we’re moving from 1970s technology to today.”

That migration is marked by dozens of new apps that range from workflow software to packages that ensure that the press hall’s temperature and humidity remain constant.

One of the earliest deployments was the rollout of certain modules of workflow software from ppi, which occurred last summer, well before the new presses went into production.

The publisher installed ppi’s PlanPag, a layout and edition planning app, and PressEditor, which enabled operators to enter press layouts for its Goss presses prior to the commissioning of the new machines. That was done to enable operators to get practical experience using the software before the new presses went on-edition.

Since then, NAC has also deployed other ppi printnet apps, including AdPag and ProPag, which handle classified pagination and ad and page assembly, respectively.

Central conduit

Because the printnet software touches almost every operation in the plant, it will be used as the conduit through which NAC managers will be able to track system performance and, ultimately, anticipate potential glitches, said Jerry Jennings, NAC’s vice president of information systems.

Copies flow from presses to NAC’s 90,000-square-foot mailroom.
 

“Our goal is to exploit the printnet software to generate reports (to all departments),” he said. “Right now, we have multiple reports, and this will give us the ability to have all of that information in one place.” Still to be determined is the software that will be used to display the gathered information.

“My vision is to have actionable information on the desk of the right people every day so that can run their departments more efficiently,” said Burns. “We will be using systems to put all of the information into a single database that will let maintenance pinpoint any potential problems quickly.”

Case in point: software to track web breaks, which will soon be engineered into the four FMC AGVs ferrying rolls to the presses, according to Jim Lothrup, press maintenance foreman.

Burns, Jennings and NAC Business Systems Manager Larry Madison orchestrated the plant’s network and communications infrastructure.

“The biggest challenge we faced was integrating the multiple vendors,” Jennings said, adding that the opportunity to build a new network from the ground up made meshing disparate systems an easier proposition.

To that end, NAC equipped the building with a Cisco Systems Inc. 100 megabit-per-second Ethernet network with the capability of increasing that transmission rate to gigabit levels.

Moving voice to IP

The publisher also moved to voice-over-IP protocol, enabling the company to save money on long-distance calls and to permit the transmission of both voice and data through a single pipe.

NAC’s communications capabilities were buoyed by a new transmission technology that service provider Qwest Communications Inc. debuted right at the time when NAC managers were evaluating how to link the new plant with editorial offices downtown.

The service, QMO, links the sites through 100-megabyte-per-second optical fiber, which will also enable NAC to upgrade its Internet access and thus host its Web servers internally.

“Without that service we would have had to view (less robust) alternatives,” Jennings said. “By upgrading our Internet access, we can avoid the bandwidth issues we faced with covering the (Salt Lake City) Olympics and the Elizabeth Smart abduction.”

NAC is also upgrading its storage infrastructure, rolling out a disk-based storage area network with enough capacity to store up to 5.8 terabytes of data.

Learning curve

Burns, who joined NAC in January 2005, after the project had already broken ground, faced a stiff learning curve.

“My first day of work I was on a plane to Tokyo to learn about the presses. My job was to deliver on what had already been planned,” he said.

Although the press choice had already been made, Burns made decisions about other vendors, including the computer-to-plate foundation, which is based on three lines of thermal platesetters from Kodak that are paired with benders from Nela and a plate processor manufactured by Glunz & Jensen K&F Inc.

“I thought thermal will give us the best reproduction,” he said. “It’s either ‘on’ or ‘off’ and the throughput” - the machines each generate more than 150 plates per hour - “is there.”

Burns estimates NAC will go through more than 14,000 Viper 830 Southern Lithoplate Inc. plates each month as the plant gets up to speed.

Burns also worked with Advertising Operations Director Glory Layton to shore up NAC’s advertising and preprint management foundation.

“The aim is to integrate the entire system from layout to press,” Layton said. To do that, NAC engineered the printnet software to mesh with its existing Software Consulting Services Layout 8000 ad dummying software. “This saves us time automating” the formerly manual process that paired up pages and assigned them to specific units of the press, Layton said.

NAC will bolster its ad ordering capabilities this fall when it rolls out AdBase software from Mactive Inc. That too will be linked to the printnet software. “What’s nice (with printnet) is that it’s one system, so we don’t have to bounce back and forth,” Layton said.

Making the move to the new apps required additional training.

“Everything is new, so we had people get used to the new systems before moving from downtown,” she said.

Layton’s department also links with NAC’s beefed-up postproduction operation through the oversight of FSIs and other ad products.

NAC in 2004 tapped GMA Inc. to outfit the 90,000-square-foot mailroom, purchasing a 38-head dual-out SLS-3000 inserter, three NewsGrip conveyor lines and three FlexiRoll buffers. In addition, GMA converted an existing 30-head SLS-3000 inserter NAC already owned to a 38-head design and retrofitted a third inserter from a four-head to 16-head configuration.

The installation also included GMA’s SAM production planning software, which NAC uses to manage its growing insert and preprint load.

The new foundation will allow NAC to eliminate one prerun as it assembles packages, said Robert Percival, packaging manager. NAC’s postproduction department will also be able to produce and prepare for delivery a 250,000-copy TMC it formerly had to outsource.

Quipp Systems Inc. stackers and Samuel Strapping Systems strappers round out the mailroom.

“It’s good technology, and we are in the process of getting it all organized so that it all works together,” Percival said.

Zoning to grow

NAC currently inserts about 65 to 70 pieces a week in the two papers, with the bulk - about 45 pieces - stuffed into the Sunday edition.

Zoning capabilities, meantime, will grow after NAC selects new circulation management software, expected this summer. “Right now, our zoning is limited, but that will change,” Percival said.

“We are pleased with the partnerships and working relationships with all our vendors,” Burns said about the cooperation among the various suppliers.

“We wanted to start everything up at once. It’s one thing to print 15,000 copies but have to throw them away (because of print quality). It’s another thing entirely to print live right from the very beginning, and that’s what we did.”