SMALL-TOWN PLANTS HANDLE LOCAL PRODUCTION

Publishers Build To Consolidate, Maintain Production


When the Brown family two years ago sold its Cortez
(Colo.) Journal to the company that operates the daily
Durango (Colo.) Herald, the 7,200-circulation
thrice-weekly had been in its building since the 1930s. "We can't
expand at that location," said the papers' publisher, Richard G.
Ballantine.

Rather than see their operation in Montezuma County, in the
southwestern corner of Colorado, merge with that of the
neighboring La Plata County daily, Journal employees will
move into their own new headquarters this year.

Bucking the trend to consolidate operations of commonly owned
nearby newspapers, Ballantine remarked: "We want to keep those
jobs in Cortez."

But the small, two-story building is an "awkward work
environment" for the staff of 40, said Ballantine. So his company
is building 24,000 square feet of office and production space
planned and designed by designAlliance, Boulder, Colo., for a
site that keeps the paper in town -- across from a park, a block
off Main Street, the publisher said. The paper's new home will
have a community room for use by local groups.

Editor Suzy Meyer said more press units are needed because more
color has meant fewer pages. Besides printing the Journal,
Ballantine said, "We do a fair amount of commercial work out of
[the current] plant." Among other publications, the plant prints
a sister weekly, the 750-circulation Mancos Times-Tribune.
For those reasons, when the six-unit Goss Community press is
relocated, it will be installed with a second folder and two
adjacent stacked units to increase its four-color capacity.

A stitcher and trimmer are to be purchased later, and, should it
become necessary, Ballantine added, "we'll have plenty of room
for a mechanical inserter."

"We are definitely planning to be moved by Christmas," said
Meyer, adding that her press crew promised no down days.

In fall of next year, Horvitz Newspapers Inc. expects to open a
second plant at its Kent, Wash., print site to handle not only
that community's 22,628-circulation South County Journal,
but also the 26,969-circulation Eastside Journal in
Bellevue, and six weeklies. All are in western King County, most
near Seattle. (Out on the Olympic Peninsula, the smaller
Peninsula Daily News handles its own production.)

Production functions at the larger daily won't disappear,
however. Bellevue's universal copy desk will continue paginating
both Journals (prepared with a DewarView system), sending
page files by T1 line to the pressroom in Kent. The weeklies
(prepared on a Baseview system) will have a similar arrangement
for printing in Kent.

As designAlliance sought to do in Cortez, Chuck Blevins &
Associates aimed for "a good work environment" in Kent (e.g., big
windows to bring daylight to the pressroom and break area). In
addition to planning and design, CBAssociates helped specify
equipment needs -- determined in part by the expectation of more
commercial work.

The 56,000-square-foot plant will use a "two-story support core,"
with prepress and platemaking on the second level, where a bridge
to the press decking will make for easy plate delivery to upper
printing couples on a new Dauphin Graphic Machines 440. The
single-wide, one-plate-around press will consist of six four-
high, full-color towers; two stacked units; two folders; and 10
Amal AR60 reelstands perpendicular to the press line.

"We will have the capacity to print 40 broadsheet pages in either
one or two sections, with process color on 24 pages," said
President Peter Horvitz, adding that the plant is designed to be
able to add a duplicate eight-tower press and a duplicate 630
inserter." (The existing Heidelberg inserter, he said, will be
expanded to 22 stations when relocated to the new plant.) To
accommodate growth cost-effectively, he remarked, "you only want
to build it once."

Of its more than 100 commercial jobs a month, Seattle
Weekly is among its biggest customers. Beginning this month,
however, it adds another: "The new plant was designed with the
needs of Investor's Business Daily taken into
consideration," Horvitz said. And for IBD print sites,
that means computer-to-plate (CTP) output. IBD will
install the platesetters, but Horvitz, though well along in
pagination, will not move its own titles to CTP until every page
is made up electronically. "We hope over time to convert to it,"
Horvitz said.

Horvitz will keep its existing building and its Goss Community
press, commercial inserter, and stitcher-trimmer for many of
those commercial jobs. With much of the work shifting to the new
plant, space in the current building can be converted to
newsprint storage, Horvitz said.

Less newsprint waste, a cutoff that will shrink to 211/2 from
223/4 inches, and fewer press and mailroom operators will help
justify the cost of the plant, which Horvitz expects will employ
more than 100 people.



Jim Rosenberg (tech@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor covering newspaper technology for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.