The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman in August went live with its browser-based NewsWay workflow from ProImage. The transition to NewsWay was part of a conversion from film to computer-to-plate, which has allowed the publisher to completely eliminate film, said Prepress Manager Eric Edwards.

The daily chose NewsWay after looking at several other output apps, he said.

“The big thing has been the elimination of film,” he said. “For budget numbers that’s a plus. And the man hours saved on monitoring the film equipment was another huge plus — we were able to retire positions because of that.” Edwards said that one position was retained through attrition.

Eliminated chemicals

The elimination of the chemicals associated with conventional platemaking has also been a positive for the American-Statesman, which uses Creo (now Kodak) thermal CTP systems.

Photo: Austin American-Statesman
The Austin (Texas) American-Statesman’s prepress area was revamped last year when the newspaper eliminated film and transitioned to a thermal CTP workflow.
 

“Anyone who’s had to deal with human resources and safety managers knows that’s a big deal,“ Edwards said.

Although getting familiar with the NewsWay software that drives the CTP workflow took some time, everything is meshing very well, Edwards said.

“If you have knowledgeable people on your side working with the software then the train-the-trainer approach works really well.”

That approach also led the daily to develop its own training manual.

“Once we mixed the ProImage training manual with the things we’ve put together, it’s made troubleshooting pretty easy,” Edwards said.

Most pleasing to Edwards has been the technical support the paper’s users  — eight prepress staff, four publishing systems/IT staffers, four platemakers and two pressroom supervisors — have received from ProImage when issues arise.

“Since they are a smaller company, you don’t get a phone tree when you call, you get a real person on the line, and that’s really helpful, especially when you’re close to deadline,” Edwards said.

Meantime, ProImage said The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., completed installation of its browser-based NewsWay app, which will manage print production for the daily and The Times in Trenton, N.J., together with remote print sites in Piscataway and Montville, N.J.