The Key West (Fla.) Citizen in August revved up two alfaQuest Technologies’ NewsXpress violet computer-to-plate units, becoming the first newspaper to deploy the platesetter that was introduced to the newspaper industry earlier this year.

Each NewsXpress can image up to 100 plates per hour for production of The Citizen’s Monday-Saturday product, as well as a number of weeklies and specialty pubs produced by the Cooke Communications paper.

“Because we’re so remote we put in two machines — one as a backup — but we’re also splitting publications between the units so they’re both in production,” said John McCormick, chief technology officer at the paper.

Photos: alfaQuest
John McCormick, chief technology officer, John Kent Cooke, Jr., publisher and Randy Erickson, vice president of operations for The Key West Citizen.
 

The daily’s install also includes an alfaQuest NewsMate autoloader with a 100-plate-capacity cassette, Glunz & Jensen Raptor 68 plate processors and Fuji LPNNV violet plates.

To better manage its workflow, The Citizen is using alfaQuest’s Panther RIP software, which it began using with its previous alfaQuest Panther Pro 62 filmsetter, and Page Imposer.

“We looked at a few other vendors as far as workflow and decided to go with Page Imposer,” McCormick said. “It was a pretty easy transition from our prior PantherPro operation.”

The daily also installed archive browser software from alfaQuest.

Aging equipment spurred move

McCormick said aging equipment was a key factor in updating The Citizen’s hardware and software.

Because the newspaper’s prepress area measures
9-feet-wide-by-50-feet-long, the two CTP lines were
installed end to end.
 

“That was a prime consideration; increased maintenance costs and the need for redundancy in that part of our operation because we only had one PantherPro with a PantherPlus as backup,” he said.

Quality benefits were immediately apparent to the daily in both black-and-white and color publications.

“As soon as we installed we had a tremendous increase in quality,” McCormick said. “Speed and workflow have also improved — things come together in one publication with Page Imposer.”

The Citizen relies on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale for its offsite disaster recovery.