Just four months after its debut, Austrian national daily Oesterreich is making a significant dent in the country’s competitive newspaper market.

The full-color tabloid (daily, 400,000; Sunday, 750,000) launched Sept. 1 with a novel production approach that blends the look of a glossy magazine with the topicality of a daily newspaper. To that end, each day’s edition contains a mix of heatset and coldset sections that range from coldset-produced national and regional news to heatset-printed lifestyle and television listings magazines. The Sunday edition, meantime, has an additional heatset wraparound section for readers.

“The goal was to produce a publication that is aimed at a younger target group and also focus on women,” said Wolfgang Fellner, the founder and chairman of Oesterreich. “It is a new format and a new print idea, blending both heatset and coldset.”

Oesterrreich’s GeoMAN press at its Tulln, Austria, production facility.
 

Fellner Medien, which invested more than $30 million to launch the paper, produces Oesterreich at three sites, two in Austria and one in Germany. The major Austrian site, in Tulln, just outside of Vienna, is anchored by a hybrid heatset/coldset GeoMAN press from MAN Roland Inc. Shortly after the paper’s introduction, Fellner tapped a second Austrian plant, in Sankt Poelten, to meet additional production demands. That facility, equipped with a Goss International Corp. Uniliner press, produces coldset sections.

The third plant, in Passau, Germany, has a MAN Roland ColorMAN hybrid press.

Similar designs

The Tulln press has four towers, one double-folder with three formers and a Megtec dryer. The machine is equipped with a MAN Roland turbo-dampening system and has a 20.52-inch cutoff and 55.12-inch web width.

The ColorMAN, in Germany, is also configured as four towers, but three are 9-cylinder CIC units while the remainder is a blanket-to-blanket tower capable of printing on coated stock. It, too, is equipped with a Megtec dryer, but has a slightly longer cutoff and slightly larger web width.

 “MAN Roland offered a solution that would let us simultaneously produce the magazines and daily newspapers, which had an enormous attraction for us as it offered a major advantage in comparison to our competitors,” said Wolfgang Zekert, Oesterreich’s chief operating officer. A key benefit of the heatset/coldset combination: Other Austrian papers could only offer magazine-type ad placement once a week in publications that, because of print deadlines, had stale news. Oesterreich could provide the same high-quality placement, each day, in a magazine with fresh news and information.

A press operator checks print quality. The Austrian daily uses a combination of coldset for news and heatset for feature and lifestyle sections.
 

Additionally, Fellner wanted presses with as short a makeready window as possible in order to allow the plants to produce commercial work in addition to Oesterreich. “MAN Roland understood what we wanted to achieve,” said Zekert.

Fitting vision

Fellner executives first began evaluating press suppliers two years ago, seeking a vendor with technology capable of allowing them to produce a newspaper with coldset and heatset sections on an everyday basis. While the approach is widely used in Australia and the Middle East, it’s rare in Europe and non-existent in North America.

“We offered them a design that fit their vision by combining our experience between newspaper and commercial heatset printing,” said Robert Wiedemann, MAN Roland’s vice president of web press sales. “It’s an economic approach and enables editors to include the freshest news.”

Wiedemann said MAN Roland fortified the GeoMAN and ColorMAN presses slated for Oesterreich with beefed-up inking units and a separate infeed unit for higher web tension. The folders were engineered with horizontal splitting to allow parallel production of two products simultaneously.

Finally, the machines had third form rollers and an additional oscillating roller with the capability to cool the ink train to guarantee consistent print quality, Wiedemann said. Installation of the presses began in February 2006.

One workflow app

Fellner also tapped MAN Roland to install the vendor’s Pecom press control and printnet workflow software. The apps allow the publisher to manage both prepress and press operations through an integrated conduit, said Zekert. “Printnet is creating a fully automated output workflow, from the time we receive the digital PDF pages through RIPing, pairing and calculation of presets, to merging, imaging and bending the plates,” he said.

Fellner selected Kodak to provide three Trendsetter 200 thermal computer-to-plate systems to support preproduction. It also picked Digital Technology International to supply front-end editorial. advertising and production software. DTI equipped the daily with a 220-seat suite of software that includes NewsSpeed, ClassSpeed, AdSpeed, PlanSpeed and SpeedDriver.

Postproduction is handled at both the Tulln and Passau plants, with Ferag RollStream and associated systems in place.