The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., is in the midst of a comprehensive project to cloak aging presses with new controls, new digital inking and other components.

The rebuild, conducted by Pressline Services Inc., covers The Morning Call’s two Goss International Corp. Metroliner presses.

The project will conclude next summer.

The presses are being outfitted with new controls from Rockwell Automation, digital inking from Controls Group Inc. and spraybars from technotrans.

Pressline and Rockwell teamed up in 2006 in a bid to provide an integrated package of drive, control and press modification services.

When the project is complete, The Morning Call will have five PressView centralized control workstations, integrated with previously upgraded Allen-Bradley digital main press drives, said Jim Minue, Rockwell’s director of print systems. Existing folder desk functionality on each press will be integrated through a ControlLogix PLC and the PressView controls.

48-inch width

In addition to upgrading the presses, Pressline is reducing The Morning Call’s web width to 48 inches as Morning Call parent Tribune Publishing moves to standardize the majority of its broadsheet dailies to the 12-inch page width by mid-2008.

The exceptions: The (Baltimore) Sun and Daily Press in Newport News, Va., which sport 49-inch webs.

The Morning Call project follows two other Pressline-managed web-width reductions at Tribune’s Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, said Mark Thomas, Tribune’s director of group operations and newsprint.

Next up: The Hartford (Conn.) Courant, which will move to a 48-inch web next year. Pressline will also manage that project, which will cover the paper’s four Goss Metro presses.

“Pressline has done an outstanding job, on-time and on-budget,” Thomas said of the supplier’s work.

Moving to narrower webs — the Los Angeles Times and flagship Chicago Tribune will debut as 48-inch products early next year in projects managed by Goss — is part of an overall Tribune initiative to move its eight broadsheets to as common a platform as possible.

Standardize operations

That strategy extends to software deployments, such as the CCI Europe advertising and editorial apps Tribune is currently rolling out groupwide.

“We’re working with them to support a common image area on our pages, and with a common width, that we believe will minimize the work and allow our papers to share specific projects,” Thomas said.

Once Tribune wraps up its web-reduction projects next year, Thomas said the publisher will examine other steps it might take to corral consumables costs, including dropping webs further or purchasing newsprint from Chinese vendors (see Newspapers & Technology, December 2006). Trib’s broadsheets sport cutoffs ranging from 22 inches to 22.75 inches, forcing careful consideration of page widths that some readers or advertisers might consider too narrow.

“We’ll optimize as much as possible, but we also have to think about customer service and our advertisers and we must make sure they are comfortable with our product,” Thomas said.