The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in October rolled out two Kodak Trendsetter 200s and one Trendsetter 150 at its satellite plant in Maryland Heights, and two Trendsetter 100 models at its downtown location. The Post-Dispatch is one of 15 Lee Enterprises sites to recently transition to the vendor’s thermal computer-to-plate foundation (see Newspapers & Technology, October 2007).

The Post-Dispatch (daily, 265,111; Sunday, 420,222) laid the foundation for the platesetters ahead of the install, according to Blake Dickie, director of operations.

 

“We got our workflow system about six weeks earlier than the CTP devices,” he said. “We got our infrastructure up and running. We added procedures and ran the workflow parallel with our film system for over a month.”

Photo: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Peter Wagner, director of printing operations, and Sandy O’Keefe, imaging manager for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
 

The daily’s workflow is based on Kodak’s Prinergy Evo and Newsmanager software.

“The last piece of the puzzle was actually installing the imaging devices and Nela sortation system and overall everything has gone well,” Dickie said.

Increased speed

The newspaper has realized a marked increase in speed since the go-live.

“The time we’ve saved from the conventional method — from last page sent to good copy — has improved dramatically,” Dickie said.

Operating expense savings have also been dramatic — something that Lee originally outlined as key to the project at its outset.

“The bottom line is there’s a great ROI in it for us,” Lee Vice President of Production and Chief Information Officer Brian Kardell told Newspapers & Technology in October.

Within a month of installing the workflow and equipment, Dickie said the Post-Dispatch shut down the filmsetters and opted not to maintain any film backup.

“We worked with Kodak to solve any remaining issues and we had three of the five CTP machines installed when we went off of film,” he said. “We met as a group and decided we were off film starting with the next day’s edition.”

The move went smoothly for both prepress and pressroom staff and Dickie said the paper is imaging approximately 10,000 Kodak plates per week.

 “We’ve essentially eliminated the plateroom, so it’s basically prepress to the pressroom,” he said.

When the rollouts are complete Lee will have 31 Trendsetters installed throughout 15 sites, in the process becoming the only publisher to employ every model of Kodak’s CTP line.

Texas daily converts to thermal

The Corpus Christi (Texas) Caller-Times, meantime, also rolled out CTP equipment and associated software from Kodak.

As with the Post-Dispatch, the deployment enabled the newspaper to eliminate its plateroom, said Ron Ferriby, vice president of operations.

The Caller-Times (daily, 51,002; Sunday, 56,505) opted for two Trendsetter News 70 units, which the publisher took live last June 6.  The same day, the E.W. Scripps-owned paper trotted out its slimmed-down, 46-inch web and went live with a new front-end system for editorial and classifieds.

“A project like that will keep your eyes open at night, but it was flawless,” Ferriby said. “Everything just fell into place.”

In addition to the platesetters on the prepress side, the daily installed a Nela punch bender.

“We put all new lockups on the press and installed the plate bender and we’re losing no plates — we’ve got perfect registration,” Ferriby said.

Platemaking for three presses

In conjunction with the daily product, produced on a Goss Metro press, the Caller-Times prints commercial work and in-house forms on Didde and A.B. Dick presses. Plates for all three presses, totaling roughly 8,000 per month, are produced on the Trendsetters.

“Every bit of printing that we do here goes through that system,” Ferriby said.

Although both Trendsetters are in daily production, Ferriby said the newspaper originally decided to buy two machines in order to have adequate backup that would allow the publisher to completely eliminate film.

“We also have the ability to manually bend plates in the event that the plate bender goes down.”