The New York Times debuted its 48-inch wide format Aug. 6, eight months earlier than previously scheduled.

“We wanted to take advantage of the savings opportunity,” said Tom Lombardo, vice president of production at The Times, explaining why execs decided to accelerate the earlier timetable that called for the slimmed down Times to roll out next spring.

Crews from Goss International Corp. whittled down the web widths of five Colorliner presses at The Times’ College Point, N.Y., facility as well as nine Goss machines in other Times’ sites, including presses in Boston, Chicago and Lakeland, Fla.

 

The Times in July 2006 said it would reduce its 13.5-inch page width to 12 inches in an effort to trim newsprint and consumables expenditures. The Times said it expects to save more than $10 million annually by trimming the page size and will keep another $6 million by making the switch this year instead of waiting until 2008, a spokesman said.

In addition to cutting the press’ web, The Times bolstered the College Point Colorliner machines through the addition of Q.I. Press Controls’ registration systems, technotrans spraybar dampening systems and Baldwin Technology Co. Inc. blanket washing systems.

Photos: Goss International
A technician from Goss International checks components on a Colorliner press to be shipped to The New York Times’ College Point, N.Y., press facility.




A Goss worker wraps plastic around an NYT Colorliner unit. The press is the largest ever manufactured at Goss’ New Hampshire factories.
 

Additionally, the paper purchased six Winrob II palletizing systems and six PSW stretch wrappers from Schur Packaging Systems and 17 automatic guided vehicles from FMC Technologies to shore up operations at College Point, which is being expanded by 50,000 square feet to accommodate the shutdown of a sister Times facility in Edison, N.J.

On the prepress side, The Times recently put into production six violet computer-to-plate systems and associated hardware and software from Agfa.

Meantime, Lombardo said Goss began shipping components of the sixth Colorliner press that will be installed at College Point. The 4-by-2 machine, to be configured as 96 couples and 12 towers with a 2:5:5 jaw folder, will go on-edition next spring.

Greg Blue, Goss’ senior vice president, aftermarket, said The Times’ project “was well planned and well supported.”

“The Times did an excellent job of communicating and providing the support we needed.”

Meantime, Goss said it sold a Uniliner and Uniliner S press to Hong Kong publisher Sing Tao News Corp. to print Headline Daily, a freesheet paper.