Fairfax Media Group placed an order with Goss International Corp. for two doublewide Uniliner presses, the vendor said.

The new 80,000-copy-per-hour presses will be installed at Rural Press Printing in the Brisbane suburb of Ormiston, Queensland, Australia, and at Christchurch Press in New Zealand by the end of 2008.

The two 4-by-2 presses will print up to 128 pages tabloid in full color and will be configured as four four-high towers and two 2:5:5 jaw folders with a 22.75-inch cutoff.

Each folder will feature inline stitching, and one will have quarterfolding capability. The four towers and reelstands will be located at 90 degrees to the pressline, similar to the configuration of Goss FPS presses.

“The Goss Uniliner will be a fast, flexible and a very significant upgrade for us here in Ormiston,” said Anthony Payne, regional manager at FMG. The site currently is anchored by a singlewide Community press. “Since our merger with Rural Press last May, we have been running at almost maximum capacity, so it’s definitely time for a change.”

The Ormiston plant currently produces a localized edition of the Sydney Sun Herald as well as Trading Post and Australian Financial Review, with heatset sections being      outsourced to other contract printers. Christchurch Press prints The Press, the Sunday Star Times and Christchurch Mail.

FMG is building a new plant at Christchurch Press to house the Uniliner, Goss said

Meantime, I-print Oy, the print production division of the Ilkka-Yhtymä Group in Finland, purchased a Colorliner four-high tower from Goss.

The additional tower, to be added to the publisher’s existing Newsliner press, will give the machine a total capacity of 80 broadsheet or 160 tabloid pages, with the ability to run a 32-page and a 48-page product side by side.