Rhode Island Media Group in November transitioned its dailies from film to computer-to-plate.

The Call in Woonsocket and The Times in Pawtucket were the first to go live on the publisher’s ECRM Newsmatic SSR, and The Kent County Daily Times followed in December, according to Barry Mechanic, vice president and group publisher. The platesetter is installed at the group’s production facility in Woonsocket.

Photo: ECRM
Ken Varga, production manager and Rob Sjoberg, computer technician for the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., with a Konica violet plate produced on the paper’s ECRM Newsmatic machine.
 

The Newsmatic unit replaces legacy Heidelberg Ultre 5400 filmsetters — which Mechanic said he’ll maintain as backups for the time being.

 

“We’ll keep those live by running one or two small jobs a week through them, but at some point we’ll be looking to do something else as a backup, maybe just one of their (ECRM) basic manual-load machines,” he said.

The publisher’s weeklies, which are currently produced by an outside printer and include The Pendulum of East Greenwich, The Coventry Courier, The Standard Times of North Kingstown, The Chariho Times of Charlestown and The Narragansett Times, will be transitioned to Woonsocket for production sometime during the first quarter of the year.

‘Extra comfort’

Although Mechanic said RIMG looked at other violet CTP vendors, the publisher’s existing film and chemistry deal with Konica Minolta played a part in the decision to go with ECRM, which has its own partnership agreement with Konica Minolta.

“There was a little extra comfort in knowing that if something goes wrong, I have two vendors located within an hour of me that I can go to,” Mechanic said. “Between the two of them we’ll be able to get somebody in here to fix it.”

Journal Register Co.-owned RIMG also tapped ECRM for its WorkMates workflow software to transmit the Pawtucket and Kent County papers to Woonsocket for eventual production.

“There’s a full-blown setup on the server for pages and editions, but there’s a subset called ApproveIt that allows the editorial departments to release pages to the platemaker once they’re happy with them, so there are really two ways to set the system up,” Mechanic said. “You can either automatically go to the platemaker once the pages are imposed and paired and have been proofed, or you can wait for someone to release them.”

The Kent County Times will be the last of the dailies to roll out ApproveIt.

“Right now (Kent County) is sending pages and they’re automatically going to the platemaker and the plateroom is releasing them, so the next piece is to have them control that directly,” Mechanic said.

Proofing improved

The CTP workflow has improved RIMG’s proofing process, according to the publisher, because proofs are generated from the same RIP that’s sent to the Newsmatic.

“There’s no more surprises where an ad prints fine on the proofer in the editorial department but then it bombs out when it’s sent to the RIP,” Mechanic said. “Now they’re looking at the exact image that’s going to go onto the plate and we’ve eliminated last-minute problems.”

Once the dailies are more adept at the soft proofing process, Mechanic said he hopes to eliminate the expense of paper-based hard proofs altogether.

Mont. daily goes high-speed

RIMG’s CTP conversion comes on the heels of the Daily Inter Lake’s August rollout of the high-speed version of ECRM’s Mako Newsmatic.

The Kalispell, Mont., daily researched thermal, but decided violet was a better fit, said Ken Varga, production manager.

“Thermal needs a larger power source and requires a lot of additional things to maintain the room,” he said.

Computer technician Rob Sjoberg said size was also a factor in finding a fit.

“We have some space limitations for putting this in the room and if we’d gone with a thermal or a larger violet unit, we could only fit one into the space,” he said. “This one allows us to expand and put two in at a later date.”

An eye to the future

Varga said the Daily Inter Lake is always looking at ways to boost its production capacity.

“If we don’t assume we’re going to grow that’s a bad thing.”

Varga said the paper will begin looking at an additional platesetter in the next three to four years.

“In my mind, a machine might last five to seven years maximum, so when the fourth year comes around I start looking at improvements we can make speed-wise and whether or not it’s cost-effective,” he said. “I’ve always had my eye on CTP but it wasn’t cost-effective for us in the past.”

One plate per minute

The Newsmatic has accelerated the publisher’s output speed to about one plate per minute ­— a significant increase considering it previously took two to three minutes for the paper to produce a piece of film and an additional 45 seconds to create the plate.

“That made it a pretty good deal for us, eliminating the bottleneck on the production side,” Varga said.

Varga and Sjoberg offered some advice to others implementing CTP.

“Read all the specs and follow the maintenance,” Varga said. The two found out the importance of that when they realized there was a recommended humidity requirement of 40 percent to 60 percent to support the Newsmatic.

Since Montana is known more for its bitter cold than any measurable humidity, Varga said the Daily Inter Lake now humidifies the prepress area to accommodate the specs of the platesetter.

“It’s important that people know you have to keep to those minimum requirements,” Varga said.

The daily images Konica plates, and Varga estimates his monthly plate inventory at 4,350, including outside and commercial work.

Plates are currently punched and bent manually, although Varga said that’s a process he hopes to automate in the future to improve registration and further increase efficiency.

“We may look at ECRM’s higher-end unit that includes plate punching,” he said.