Salisbury Daily Times
goes to 3-wide
Paper uses Pressline
Services to modify legacy singlewide press.
By Chuck Moozakis
Editor-In-Chief
The Daily Times in Salisbury,
Md., and other papers operated by Gannett Co. Inc.’s Delmarva Media Group next
month will go on-edition in a new production building housing a legacy
singlewide press modified to print three pages across.
The publisher used a press
retrofit service offered by Pressline Services Inc. to alter a 17-unit Goss
International Corp. Urbanite press, said Hal Koontz, production director.
PSI engineered a three-wide
ribbon deck that comes complete with slitters, angle bars and compensators that
lets users transform their two-page-wide presses into three-wide machines (see
Newspapers & Technology, December 2007).
The firm also rebuilt the
press and installed new digital inkers and spraybars. Partner Rockwell
Automation supplied new controls.
The retrofit press is part of
a $6.4 million project that includes upgraded prepress and postpress systems,
Koontz said.
Upon moving to the upgraded
press, The Daily Times, the Delaware Coast Press and other papers printed by
Delmarva will shrink their page widths to 11 inches from their current
13.5-inch-wide formats. Cutoff is 21.75 inches.
Color boost
Koontz said the press’
three-page design will dramatically increase the amount of color in the papers —
from a current eight pages per 48 pages to as many as 48 pages in 60 pages.
Delmarva’s papers are
currently printed on a 30-year-old Goss Cosmo machine.
“I was interested in the
(3-page-wide) concept,” Koontz said, adding that he was comfortable that the PSI
approach will yield dividends in terms of flexibility and cost-savings.
“The nice thing about this
layout is that I can run a variety of webs up to the 36-inch cylinder,” he said,
“so I can run an 18-inch-wide to an 11-inch-wide product. The layout of the
three-wide gives us lots of versatility.”
In addition to the press, The
Daily Times beefed up its postpress with a Muller Martini Mailroom Systems Inc.
SLS-2000 14:2 inserter from a sister Gannett paper and installed three legacy
Quipp Systems Inc. stackers that were upgraded by R&D Distribution Solutions
Inc. in Tega Cay, S.C.
For prepress, Delmarva
inherited two Agfa Polaris computer-to-plate systems from USA Today and it also
installed a Burgess Industries Inc. plate bender.
“To do this from scratch would
have cost us a hell of a lot of money,” Koontz said.
Delmarva redesigned a former
50,000-square-foot rubber factory to house the publisher’s production as well as
administrative and editorial staffs. In keeping with the strategy to save on
costs, much of the building’s architectural and engineering design was overseen
internally, with Koontz himself using a computer-aided-design app to orchestrate
some of the work.
