The migration to 44-inch webs is gaining traction as more newspapers prepare to hop on the narrow-page bandwagon.

Next to jump are The Indianapolis Star and The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., which will debut 11-inch-wide pages next spring. They are the first doublewide press papers to convert and follow the Visalia (Calif.) Times-Delta and Tulare (Calif.) Advance-Register, which debuted their 44-inch broadsheets in August (see Newspapers & Technology, October 2007).

All four papers are owned by Gannett Co. Inc., which is leading the charge to 44-inch-wide broadsheets. “In those markets where we feel it’s doable we are making the change,” said Austin Ryan, vice president of production.

Meantime, three papers owned by Schurz Communications Inc. will trim their web widths to 44 inches next year, said Charles V. Pittman, the publisher’s senior vice president of publishing. Page sizes at The South Bend (Ind.) Tribune, the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, Md., and the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind., will be affected.

“Cost pressures are what’s driving us,” he said. Schurz is still evaluating which vendors it will use to manage the projects on the doublewide presses that print the dailies. Schurz’ other seven papers, printed on singlewide machines, will remain at 46 inches, Pittman said.

Waiting and watching

Other groups are on the sidelines — for now.

“We don’t have any plans at this time to go to 44 inches,” said Frank Wolfe, director of newspaper operations at E.W. Scripps. “But I would never say never.”

At Journal Register Co., Senior Vice President of Production Bill Higginson said the company “will continue to monitor industry trends and market acceptance.”

“But for JRC, where we have small- to mid-size dailies and a sea of non-daily publications being produced on all kinds of presses, the decisions are far more difficult.” Still, he said the publisher will closely examine the 44-inch trend in 2008.

Like Wolfe, Higginson said, “We would never say never.”

The decision to narrow page widths reflects the blossoming industrywide pressure among publishers to reduce operating costs where possible.

Even though newsprint prices have moderated from their 2006 high of $675 per metric ton to below $570 for 30-pound paper, concern about dwindling plant capacity and consolidation among newsprint suppliers is reigniting publishers’ concerns about pricing.

“It’s not surprising” that newspapers are addressing newsprint needs, said Martine Hamel, vice president of the Pulp and Paper Products Council. “Consumption is weak, the industry is consolidating and there haven’t been any announcements about new capacity.”

The Indianapolis Star, for example, will debut next May as a 44-inch-wide sheet only two years after it went from 50 to 48 inches, said Bill Bolger, vice president of production.

Straightforward

“Mechanically, it’s still straightforward,” he said about modifications that will be required on the paper’s four MAN Roland GeoMAN presses. “But communications with advertisers will be a little different because the difference in size is more dramatic. We can’t shrink images; they’ll have to be built from scratch.” The Star has a 21.5-inch cutoff.

MAN Roland is overseeing the project, which will begin in February. In addition to the core daily, The Star prints The Star Press in Muncie, Ind.

At The Courier-Journal, the motivation is a “drive to address consumable costs,” said Tom Travis, vice president of production.

The paper, which went on edition with three 50-inch-wide Koenig & Bauer AG Colora press in 2004, hired KBA to manage the reduction. KBA also oversaw web-width reductions at The Kansas City (Mo.) Star and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which are now at 48 inches.

As with The Star, The Courier-Journal is shrinking from 48 inches to 44 inches. The Courier-Journal has a 21-inch cutoff, which translates into an 8.3 percent reduction in newsprint consumption.

Travis said he even examined a more drastic change, converting The Courier-Journal to a square tab with a page dimension of 10.5 inches by 10.5 inches. “I looked at it, because every time you make a reduction it costs you money.”

The move to 44 inches will also force The Courier-Journal to reassess its plate processing. Supplier Glunz & Jensen K&F Inc. is working on a processor that will allow the paper to continue its use of landscape plates, Travis said. “If they can’t do it, we’ll use plate rotators to go from landscape to regular length and landscape again.”

Antidote for market?

Press vendors and press engineering services firms see the burgeoning retrofit market a needed antidote for an otherwise flat new press market.

“We’re extremely busy with proposals and projects,” said Steve Stone, general manager of Masthead International. The firm finished more than a dozen press conversions last year at papers that moved to 48 inches. While those retrofits were fairly straightforward, overseeing a reduction to 44 inches takes more in-depth engineering for folders, formers and other press components, Stone said.

Still, the quick return publishers can get by adopting a 44-inch web is fueling interest, said Joe Bella, managing director at Acutech LLC.

“The payback on 48 was fast, and 44 inch (payback) is even quicker, perhaps less than nine months,” he said.

Vendors are also being asked to do their jobs more quickly, said Bill Reiser, manager of support services for MAN Roland’s printservices unit.

Despite the extra engineering and mechanical work involved, “We are gearing up to do (44-inch web reductions) in the same time frames required to go to 48 inches,” he said.

Picking up speed

MAN Roland has overseen more than a dozen web-width reduction projects in the past 18 months, including the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance and Mobile (Ala.) Register, which moved to 47 inches, and the Toronto Star, which adopted a 46-inch web.

But how narrow is too narrow?

“Newspapers are trying to save money any way they can,” said Jim Gore, vice president and general manager of Pressline Services. “If they can get an 8 percent savings (by cutting page size from 12 inches to 11 inches) they are going to take that bite from the savings apple. And they are willing to spend 25 or 30 percent (of the cost of a new press) to rebuild or make modifications in order to keep their existing press going for another 10 years.

“Having said that, I think papers are getting pretty close” at how far they will eventually go to narrow their pages. “But the bottom line is when the publisher can’t stand to look at the paper anymore.”