A Lesson in Magazine Printing from the Ghost of Robin Williams

Surprise, surprise, there were no takers for the copy of TIME magazine purporting to show the ghost of Robin Williams.

Despite the Dead Tree Edition article being picked up by the Naples (Florida) Daily News and several web sites, no one could scare up $10,000 and enough gullibility to bid in the eBay auction that ended Friday.

But those of you with more dollars than sense and a passion for printing errors need not despair: Almost immediately, the Kennewick, Washington-based eBay seller "warnecathe" relisted it, again with a minimum bid of 10 Gs.

Williams' ghost reportedly showed up at his mansion a month ago, but the scores of printing and publishing geeks who commented on the TIME cover were not fooled. The consensus was that the cover, along with the back cover, was simply printed without enough black ink.

A few correctly pointed out that I was wrong in saying the cover could not have been printed shortly after the press started up. Newsstand copies of TIME are bound before the subscriber copies, but the covers are printed at the same time.

Several commenters guessed that the copy was printed just after a blanket wash, a process for cleaning debris off a press in the middle of a printing job.

A blanket wash causes paper going through the press to get little or no ink, so the paper coming out of the press is supposed to be diverted to the waste stream until the color returns to normal. But in this case "the pressman was just a little too quick in deciding where the waste stopped and the good sheets started," wrote Tom Kenny of Pictorial Corporation, on the LinkedIn group Print Production Professionals. "We wouldn't be discussing this if the error didn't produce such a metaphoric image. It's the ghost in the machine."

In the blink of an eye
Another one of the 34 comments in the PPP group provided more detail: "The black ink is way way down, the magenta and yellow are down a bit, the cyan a hair more than the magenta and yellow," wrote Eric Eliel of e2 Communications. "Looks very much like they just washed the blankets and the press was coming back to color."

"Keep in mind, the speed at which modern heatset [press] webs run, at 2000+ feet per minute, translates to about 17 copies per second at speed. The presses should come back to color after a washup in about 50 to 100 copies, which is about 3 or 4 seconds. This 'color' issue could occur in a blink of an eye, literally."

Sandra Jones of Best Version Media explained why the faulty cover couldn't have been noticed and pulled out during the binding process: "Being a subscriber copy, it would have come off the stitcher already buried in a postal bundle."

And no one disagreed with the assessment offered by Grace Savides of Independent Printing: "Wow, that eBay seller is quite the opportunist. It's amazing how little shame some people have. Glad no one's put a bid on it yet."

The Line Between Newspaper Publishers and Commercial Printers Continues to Blur

Two announcements within the past week demonstrate that some newspaper publishers are increasingly viewing printing as a profit center while others take the opposite tack and shut down their printing operations.

The Chicago Sun-Times revealed Tuesday that it will become the second major metropolitan daily in the U.S. to outsource all of its printing. But rather than turning production over to a commercial printer, as the San Francisco Chronicle did, the Sun-Times will entrust its printing to the rival Chicago Tribune starting in late September.

The next day, Baldwin Technology Company announced that is has sold UV dryers that will be installed on two newspaper presses in Australia "to significantly improve print quality and enable use of a wider range of paper qualities." In other words, the presses will be able to do heatset offset printing on such higher-grade stocks as coated and supercalendered papers as well as lower-quality coldset printing on newsprint.

As demand for printed newspapers has shrunk in recent years, publishers have more idle time on their presses and less ability to justify investing in new presses. Increasingly, they will either turn their printing over to others or chase after outside printing work to justify the investments needed to keep their printing operations up to date.

The Sun-Times's shift will save it an estimated $10 million annually, partly because it can narrow the paper's width, and will provide more ability to run color ads, according to a Chicago Tribune article. The Tribune plant already produces Chicago editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal but has enough capacity to take on the Sun-Times and seven suburban Sun-Times papers apparently without breaking a sweat.

Newspapers & Technology lists 20 closures of newspaper printing plants this year because of outsourcing to other newspapers. And there are increasing reports of newspaper publishers going after work that used to be done by commercial printers.

Baldwin's announcement suggests commercial printers can expect to see even more competition from newspaper publishers. Rather than the sort of multimillion-dollar investments in new presses for the San Francisco Chronicle plant, Baldwin is adding heatset as an option to the Australian presses for only $375,000 per press.

For its technology, which was originally developed for sheetfed presses, Baldwin envisions "further opportunities as printers around the world add flexibility and quality improvement to their production capabilities."

For further reading: Newspaper Production Enters Colorful, Outsourced Era and Can Transcon transform newspapers?, which explain why the San Francisco Chronicle plant and a similar facility in Montreal are so significant for both the newspaper and printing industries.

Newspaper Production Enters Colorful, Outsourced Era

Good model. Bad timing.

A new approach to producing newspapers in the United States had a colorful beginning this week when the production of all copies of the San Francisco Chronicle were outsourced to a new plant built and run by Transcontinental Inc.

The Chronicle’s own 50-year-old flexographic presses were idled, along with about 200 unionized employees, after production of Sunday’s issue. Filling the void is a $200-million-plus Transcontinental plant in Fremont with three heatset/coldset offset presses, new inserting equipment -- and non-union employees.

As Dead Tree Edition has previously explained, the operation breaks new ground in the U.S. on at least three fronts: 1) The presses can run in either coldset or heatset modes, making them able to print on anything from newsprint to coated paper. Not only do they add color and boost quality for the Chronicle, they are also suited to doing general commercial printing. 2) The outsourcing of a major newspaper’s production to a commercial printer. U.S. dailies typically control their means of production. 3) The plant was designed with the ability to produce multiple newspapers, though no other clients have been announced.

The Hearst-owned Chronicle says the new operation will yield substantial savings without Hearst having to invest in new equipment. It’s not clear to what extent the savings come from the inherently greater efficiency of the new presses, narrowing the paper from six columns to five, or the switch to non-union labor. (One newspaper industry veteran tells me that non-union newspapers tend to pay their press operators as well as similar-sized union papers. But their compensation costs for the pressroom are lower because they don't have contract-imposed staffing requirements and assign more of the less skilled work to lower-paid employees.)

Don’t expect Transcontinental to be replicating its innovative San Francisco model in other metro areas any time soon. With the recession squeezing both its printing and publishing profits, the company is indicating it is tapped out for now as far as major capital investments go. And counting on the long-term viability and credit worthiness of major metro newspapers may be too much of a gamble these days.

Here's a roundup of interesting items that have appeared this week about the Transcontinental-Chronicle deal:

• The Chronicle's cool two-minute video of the plant in action, set to "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". (An ironic choice of music? You decide.)
• The Chronicle's article on Monday about the newspaper's new "wrinkle-free" era. Be sure to check out the reader comments, not all of which are glowing. One commenter says the Chronicle is now "San Francisco's trophy wife" because its role is "to hang around, look good, and not say anything." (In defense of the Chronicle, its investigative reporting -- remember when newspapers did that? -- led to the resignation this week of a college president.)
  
• SF Weekly's knockdown of the Chronicle's coverage of the new production arrangement as "an in-house infomercial". The snarky piece also hints of delivery problems on Monday.
  
• Graphic Arts Online has a rundown of the equipment in the new plant.
• An excellent article about the last day at the old Chronicle printing plant and its 200-plus employees, none of whom has been hired by Transcontinental.
• Transcontinental Monday news release, which includes some details about the new plant's energy efficiency.
  

Can Transcon transform newspapers?

Transcontinental Inc.’s vision for transforming the North American newspaper industry will get its first test later this year when the company starts up innovative presses in San Francisco and Montreal. The bold model could shake up parts of the commercial-printing industry as well, but the Canadian printing company is apparently having second thoughts about the plan.

Transcontinental’s new San Francisco plant and expanded Montreal plant will have at least three features that set them apart:

1) The ability to do both heatset and coldset printing on the same presses. The presses will be able to print standard newspapers, higher-quality newspaper inserts, and various commercial products on a wide variety of papers including newsprint, supercalendered, and coated grades. Though a similar press is running in Germany, this will apparently be the first use of the combined heatset/coldset approach in North America.

2) The printing of newspapers by a commercial printer rather than by a newspaper publisher. Most major newspapers in the United States do their own printing or – in a few cases like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal – contract it out to other newspaper publishers. In contrast, virtually all U.S. magazines and many European newspapers use commercial printers to print their products.

3) They are intended from the outset for the production of multiple daily newspapers from different companies. The typical U.S. daily-newspaper printing plant is built around the needs and schedule of the newspaper that owns it, even if it does work for other publishers or takes in commercial jobs.

Transcontinental has contracts to take over production of Hearst Corporation’s San Francisco Chronicle in the second half of this year at the new plant and to print a variety of daily and weekly papers, including The Globe and Mail, at its Transmag plant in Montreal. The struggles of the North American newspaper industry – which have fueled speculation that the Chronicle would abandon print altogether – have slowed Transcontinental’s vision of taking its innovative model to other metropolitan areas.

“We continue to have discussions with some newspaper publishers in North America,” says the company’s most recent quarterly report to investors. “However, given the deteriorating market conditions in this industry in the U.S. and the deteriorating financial condition of potential customers, and considering our model becomes much more compelling when it includes more than one paper in a given area, we do not expect to sign additional contracts in the near term. Over the longer term, we believe our unique model will help the newspaper industry overcome its challenges.”

The model is a far cry from the usual approach in the U.S. newspaper industry, where the typical daily newspaper owns its own press (or presses) that sits idle much of the time. Many a newspaper has tried to make money off that idle press by going after commercial work. But the lack of infrastructure (such as sales, estimating, and customer service staffs), high pressroom staffing levels mandated by union contracts, limited paper capability, and the relatively poor print quality have been hurdles to success.

A couple of European mills have manufactured coated coldest papers to help newspapers compete for commercial business. But the papers look more like high-quality newsprint than like coated products, and the printing has coldset’s usual lack of precision and detail.

Rapidly deteriorating business conditions have recently caused more newspaper companies to consolidate or outsource their printing, typically to a nearby newspaper with more modern presses. With ad revenues dropping faster than you can say Craig’s List, making deadlines a couple of hours earlier to save money on printing and paper suddenly doesn’t seem like a bad option.

The San Francisco plant will supposedly benefit the Chronicle by offering later deadlines, more color pages, and better quality than the existing 40-year-old letterpress-turned-flexographic presses can. Transcontinental, which has a Canadian publishing arm, has also expressed interest in beefing up newspapers with improved quality, such as by using supercalendered papers instead of newsprint.

“Newspapers must offer quality enhancements including brighter paper, more colour, better design and provide innovative advertising value such as scented paper, in-line coupons, pop-up pages, multiple gatefolds etc.,” François Olivier, a Transcontinental executive, told a newspaper industry gathering in 2007.

The San Francisco and Montreal plants are each getting three of MAN Roland’s Colorman XXL presses, which print blanket to blanket in a 6x2 configuration. The shaftless presses feature many bells and whistles, such as closed-loop color control, automated plate loading, and folders that can be configured for a variety of products. Transcontinental will also run the post-press operations, such as inserting.

Each of the San Francisco presses will be able to produce 48 broadsheet pages, 24 in four color. The three similarly sized Montreal presses will be able to print four colors on every page and will be rated at 90,000 tabloids per hour when operating in a “double” (that is, "straight" or two out) configuration, MAN Roland says.

The first printer to use MAN Roland’s hybrid press technology, Verlagsgruppe Passau GmbH (VGP) in Germany, reports that the ability to mix heatset and coldset in the same product has attracted additional advertisers to a newspaper it prints. (See Newspapers & Technology’s excellent interview with the two of the printer’s executives.) But it has also struggled with learning heatset; for example, it was surprised to discover that maximum ink densities varied by paper stock.

Transcontinental doesn’t face the challenge of learning about SWOP standards the hard way because it already has extensive experience with heatset web offset. And it should be encouraged by VGP’s report that its costs for heatset and coldset on the hybrid press are nearly identical.