Print Geek Alert!: A 360-Degree Video of The New York Times Being Printed

The New York Times published a two-minute 360-degree video today of its own printing plant in action.

The video doesn't try to be comprehensive, instead focusing on arresting shots that show the scale and sophistication of the operation -- such as a robotic crane transporting a massive roll of newsprint from storage and a web of already-printed paper picking up color as it zips through the press.

Plus what looks like an amusement-park ride for newspapers, which transports the printed product from the pressroom, then automatically bundles, palletizes, shrink-wraps, and loads into on to a delivery truck.

"The presses print 300,000 to 800,000 papers daily," the video tells us. "Most nights, the presses start before 11 p.m. and finish printing all editions before 3 a.m."

I've been in a lot of pressrooms, and I've never seen as much automation as The Times has.

Nor have I seen working press operators who weren't sporting earmuff-style hearing protection. I don't think The Times employees were even wearing the little foam in-ear inserts.  Perhaps the press is unusually quiet, or perhaps The Times' occupational-safety rules are more lax than those of magazine printers.

Here's Why We Avoid Four-Color Body Type

Thank you, The Wall Street Journal. You did me and a whole lot of other production managers a huge favor today with your printing foul-up.

Every couple of years, it seems, I have to talk an editor out of going along with a designer's proposal to jazz up a publication by getting rid of boring old black body type in articles. "Ooh, purple would look nice."

It was hard enough way back in the 20th Century to explain why printing 8-point type with four colors of ink would create an illegible mess. At least then most editors and designers had some clue about how printing worked.

Nowadays, you're likely to be dealing with someone who cut his teeth on the web and can't fathom why what he sees on his monitor can't look exactly the same when printed. ("I don't want four colors; I only want purple!" "Well, if the printer can't make the colors register exactly, get another printer.")

Now I have my evidence.

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.