Few publishers better understand what it means to put their newspaper production systems to the test than those in the path of the 2004 hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast.

One publisher that definitely knows is Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers, which prints The Stuart News, the Press Journal in Vero Beach, the Tribune in Fort Pierce and a number of other weekly, lifestyle and business publications on Florida’s East Coast.

STCN was thrown from the frying pan into the fire when it went live at its then-brand-new $45 million production facility in September 2004.

Photo: SCTN
Seated, Don McIntyre, prepress technician and standing, Mike Rsaza, production systems manager and Todd Lentz, advertising prepress manager at Scripps Treasure Coast.
 

It was in the process of bringing all of its systems live — including the two MAN Roland Inc. RegioMAN presses anchoring the 126,000-square-foot plant and a computer-to-plate foundation built around two Kodak Newsetter 100s — when Hurricane Jeanne slammed into the area Sept. 26, said Prepress Manager Todd Lentz.

It was STCN’s prepress workflow software that was set to go live immediately prior to the storm, and by all accounts, the workflow, consisting of PrintExpress from alfaQuest Technologies running on a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire server with Solaris software, passed the test with flying colors.

 “During the summer (2004) we got it going and running and we were doing testing and then the hurricanes hit,” Lentz said.

“We went live that day in testing mode and we also had our press up and in testing mode.”

Scripps’ new facility sustained a lot of damage when the storms came and the press was knocked out of commission for a full day.

“Besides firing our press up, we had to fire up PrintExpress right away,” Lentz said. “Training went from two weeks worth of time, to overnight and we were able to do that. It was very simple to use and I was able to train my guys coming in pretty easily.”

Scripps’ overall workflow foundation has been equally dependable since that day, according to Production Systems Manager Mike Rsaza.

Prior to its Sun Fire/alfaQuest install, the publisher employed 10 hardware RIPs (from three vendors) and seven imagers running to three different presses at each of its sites in Stuart, Ft. Pierce and Vero Beach.

“All of our paginators were basically centralized here in Stuart and just keeping track of all the outputs and which pages had to go where was a nightmare,” Rsaza said.

Of the various RIPs Scripps had used, Rsaza said the publisher experienced the most consistency with Adobe’s — with which alfaQuest integrates.

“What wouldn’t run in our other RIPs always seemed to run in Adobe, so we stayed with alfaQuest when it was time to pick a workflow solution,” Rsaza said. “We also purchased a couple of Sun Fire 480s and two RIPs with about 200 gig of marriage space.”

Rsaza and Lentz, along with additional production staffers, worked together to configure the page-naming code for the workflow and to determine how various jobs would be processed through the system.

“We made it really simple for the newsroom so that all they had to know was if it was a broadsheet or tabloid, or a quarterfold or doubletruck,” Rsaza said. “Black-and-white and color are easy to output because all the routing takes place in alfaQuest.”

The staff further simplified the workflow by automating the platesetters based on coding so that certain publication codes automatically generate two sets of plates.

“We’ve got two folders on our RegioMAN press, so at night we run them as two separate presses,” Rsaza explained. “We run four dailies, two at a time and then earlier in the evening we run a fifth daily.”

Scripps receives all of its commercial jobs as PDFs, except for the London Financial Times, which uses TIFF imports.

The publisher also prints all of the tabs for sister daily the Naples Daily News. Prepress users in Naples use client software to access PrintExpress and control the approval process.

All jobs are preflighted with OneVision’s Asura app.

“Because of Naples’ press configuration, we resize their pages through the Asura box so they marry up on our plate configurations,” Rsaza said. “It’s worked very well.”

Better than out of the box

In fact, Rsaza said Scripps workflow is just as advanced as those of newspapers using “out-of-the-box” apps.

“In addition to page-pairing doing multiple plates, we generate tearsheets for a library system, and we also do all the ink presets for CIP3,” he said. “And what’s neat about the configuration is we do all of these things on one box.”

Most recently, Scripps employed the page-tracking functionality of PrintExpress, which reads log files to generate reports that give prepress staff the details of a job, including when it came through the front end and how long it took to RIP.

After prepress approval, jobs go into another queue where the imaging department releases plates to the appropriate Newsetter unit. Default settings allow users to manually send jobs to a different platesetter when necessary.

Scripps in September integrated the workflow with its Layout 8000 software from Software Consulting Services in a bid to completely automate the page-pairing process.

“Because of the way our coding is and the way our text files from Layout 8000 are, each one of our daily products can actually be a combination of three different publication codes because of common pages and the way they’re zoned,” Rsaza said. “Now everything that comes in from Layout is automatically set so the prepress people won’t have to do anything.”

Final tweak

A forthcoming automation tweak will come from OneVision and will aim to eliminate problems associated with pulling PDFs from STCN’s FTP site.

“We can run right through Asura and post files right into PrintExpress without any intervention,” Lentz said. “When it comes up online and a client sees their pages posted, they know whether or not they can approve them, or we’ll approve them so we can see the pages.”

Speed was a major consideration for STCN when it began hammering out its workflow and overall, Rsaza said he’s impressed by how much more the publisher is doing with less.

“We do so many more pages today with two software RIPs than we did with 10 hardware RIPs, and we do it so much faster.”

In-house staff training has been instrumental in making the workflow tick, Rsaza said.

The Sun servers have also impressed Scripps, Rsaza said.

“Scripps’ (servers) got attacked (by a computer virus) about seven months ago. It came through the corporate firewall and at every newspaper a good percentage of the PCs got damaged. Because of the Solaris boxes, we didn’t have that problem,” he said.