The Republican Eagle in Red Wing, Minn., took flight on a computer-to-plate workflow last summer. Today, the paper is relying on its two Kodak Trendsetter News 70 units, two plate processors and conveying units and a Nela vision bender, to handle the prepress demands for a dozen papers.

A major part of the conversion for the Republican Eagle was the July installation of Kodak’s Newsmanager workflow app. The software lassos the workflow for the daily, with a circulation of roughly 7,000, as well as the 12 other papers - located throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin - the publisher produces at its Red Wing site.

“We receive electronic pages from all of those newspapers’ sites,” said Production Manager Terry Meier. “They create pages and they have their own folders and we give them plate furniture or and ID number because Newsmanager looks for a particular number of characters in its naming conventions.”

Each ID number allows the app to recognize each individual newspaper, Meier said and Newsmanager uses the ID information to run each newspaper job through the app.

Troubleshooting help

“It does a little bit of troubleshooting,” Meier said. “For instance, it will recognize an RGB photo, or an incorrect font, and it’ll set that page aside - and then it prepares the files to go to the Trendsetters.”

Files come in as PDFs and the workflow app converts them to 1-bit TIFFs. The Republican Eagle also used the PDF file format when the newspaper imaged film, but Meier said the workflow has been significantly simplified since converting to CTP and using Newsmanager.

Following the Republican Eagle’s August 2006 go-live, Meier said the newspaper immediately noticed “a snap in our color” and that the registration issues that went along with film virtually disappeared.

“Because of the type of printing we’re doing compared to some of the bigger newspapers - we’re using a plate that’s 2-up - we had some page-to-page registration issues, for example if one piece of film moved and the other didn’t, then you were reburning that whole plate because there was no adjustment to move anything there if it wasn’t 100 percent square to start with.”

Meier said his newspaper in the future will consider adding FM screening capability to its lineup, but for now, he is pleased with color quality.

“We’re using graybar systems on just about all of our products for color quality - measuring and stuff like that so that we can make sure that we’re laying our ink and water balance out right for the press, which helps us work back upstream with CTP and prepress for proofing, etc.,” Meier said. “It’s a pretty complete system at this point.”