Feature: 5 Ways to Save

By cutting back on consumables and maintaining existing equipment, operations departments can reduce costs

By LaShell Stratton

First Published: January 2008

From the newsroom to the pressroom, many newspapers are finding ways to save money to offset declining circulation and advertising revenue.

The rising price of consumables, particularly newsprint and ink, has put more pressure on production departments to cut costs. Newsprint prices continue to fluctuate, and two major ink manufacturers, Flint Group (www.flintgrp.com) and Sun Chemical (www.sunchemical.com), each announced last year that ink prices would increase between 6 and 11 percent.

“I think it is a good idea to always look for a better way to do things,” says Tom Croteau, NAA senior vice president of technology. “Web-width reductions and lower basis weight newsprint have been around for the past 10 years. Some of the new ways to save money include outsourcing and consolidating services.” (See related story, “8 Trends to Track in ’08,” p. 22.)

Here are five ways that newspapers’ operations departments can cut costs while maintaining quality in 2008.

Use Lighter Weight Newsprint
The Rockford (Ill.) Register Star (average daily circulation, 56,665) saved 6 percent on newsprint costs after switching from 30-pound newsprint to 27-pound newsprint in 2006. Now the paper is considering 25-pound newsprint to save even more money but, at presstime, had no immediate plans in place, says Kris Smith, production director. “We are currently in the fact-finding stage regarding who manufactures it and what the cost would be,” she says. “The price varies significantly between vendors, and at this point, it is difficult to estimate the true savings.”

The Register Star switched to 27-pound newsprint in May 2006 when it traded its 1967 Hoe letterpress for a KBA (www.kbavt.com) Colora press.  The learning curve from old press to new was so great the publisher decided to do the newsprint and press conversion simultaneously, Smith says.

The paper initially experienced show-through and linting—when paper fibers attach themselves to the offset blanket and affect ink transfer—but found that switching from 220 total ink density to 180 helped to compensate, Smith says.

The Los Angeles Times switched from 30-pound to 27.8-pound newsprint in 2006. After the change, the newspaper experienced linting and web breaks but quickly curtailed that by increasing preventive maintenance on the press, says Russ Newton, senior vice president of operations. Newspapers considering lighter-weight newsprint should check and change blankets, regularly check and adjust impression settings, and change rollers that are too hard, he says. 

However, Newton would not disclose how much money the Times saved, saying that it is proprietary information.

Reduce Web Width
By reducing its web width from 60 to 48 inches, The Wall Street Journal saved $18 million in newsprint last year, says Paul Cousineau, director national production for Dow Jones & Co. in Princeton, N.J.

Converting the pre-press, press and post-press equipment at Dow Jones’ 17 production plants—including 19 presses—to fit the new web width cost almost $30 million, says Larry Hoffman, vice president of production. “The upfront equipment costs are expected to be recovered over time,” he adds. Conversion of the presses was done in one weekend, but mechanical and control system changes took about a year, he says.

The conversion also meant that Dow Jones had to manage its newsprint inventory very carefully because 60-inch newsprint rolls were no longer needed, Hoffman says.
Gannett Co. in McLean, Va., has been aggressively decreasing its newspaper properties’ web widths for 10 years. “We’ve been reducing ... from 54 to 50 to 48 and are now taking some as low as 44 inches,” says Tara Connell, vice president of corporate communications. At presstime, the 44-inch web width was the smallest in the newspaper industry.

In August 2006, the Visalia Times-Delta (average daily circulation, 19,645) and the Tulare Advance-Register (6,302) were the first Gannett newspapers to reduce their web widths to 44 inches (“Two California Papers Drop to 44-Inch Web,” November 2007, p. 50). They were soon followed by The Spectrum in St. George, Utah (22,352), and The Californian in Salinas (16,175).

The Indianapolis Star will go to a 44-inch web width in February, and The Courier-Journal in Louisville will do so in March, says Austin Ryan, vice president of production for Gannett’s Newspaper Division.

“There is definitely an opportunity for cost savings here,” he says. Gannett newspapers with reduced web widths have experienced an 8 percent gross savings for all consumables, he adds.

Optimize Ink Usage
To lower ink costs, some newspapers are investing in ink optimization software that can be incorporated into existing workflow systems. Integrated algorithms in these software programs reduce the expensive cyan, magenta and yellow inks of the CMYK printing process and replace them with the less expensive black ink while still producing a final product of the same print quality.

Newsday in Melville, N.Y., hopes to save about 5 percent of its overall ink budget when it begins using OneVision’s (www.onevision.com) ink optimization software, Asura PlugInkSave, says Ron Chiavaro, director of printing and pre-press operations. Newsday tested the software last year and plans to implement it formally after its servers are upgraded. “There is no noticeable difference in the quality of our color printing using the software,” he says.

Almost 50 Gannett newspapers use GMG Ink Optimizer (www.gmgcolor.com). The cost saving varies from newspaper to newspaper but can be as much as 10 percent, says Annette Giaco, director of print quality for Gannett’s Newspaper Division. “But it can depend on your number of impressions and your full-color page count,” she adds.

Gannett analyzes each newspaper’s cyan, magenta and yellow ink expenses, Giaco says, and then determines whether enough return on investment would be realized by installing ink optimization software.

Some newspapers might be able to save on color inks without purchasing software, Chiavaro says. “Companies can realize some savings simply by utilizing gray component replacement in the separations that they produce in-house,” he says.  

Increase Maintenance
In maintaining press and post-press equipment, determining how much money you’ll save is not as easy as figuring out how much unexpected downtime costs.

The Orlando Sentinel regularly audits its Goss (www.gossinternational.com) presses. “Given the size of our facility and because we have five presses, it’s not necessary to keep all of them running at the same time,” says Kelly Benson, vice president of operations. “Each week, we’ll do an audit of one press and as much predictive maintenance and repair as we can. So within five weeks, we will have done all of our presses.”

During an audit, maintenance crews check blanket heights and validate torque on blanket screws. They do in-depth cleaning of rubber rollers and check roller bearings. The audit can sometimes lead to major repairs such as replacing a motor, says Frank Grandinette, pressroom manager.

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland bulked up its maintenance program two years ago. “We had a very good preventive maintenance program in place that included scheduled activities based on equipment cycle time and calendar dates,” says Al Moses, reliability engineer. “The preventive maintenance routines were tracked in spreadsheets and checklists,” he says, but repair requests were not as orderly.

Daily repairs were handwritten in a logbook with no formal equipment files attached to entries. “This made it very difficult to track repair history on the equipment,” he says. The spare parts inventory was catalogued in a database but without integration to attach parts to any work activity or equipment.

So, in 2005, the newspaper implemented a Computerized Maintenance Management System. “All work requests are entered into the CMMS and are attached to specific pieces of equipment or components,” Moses says. “We turn these requests into work orders that can hold information on maintenance activities, materials purchased or issued from storerooms, and can track failure information that eventually becomes a permanent part of equipment history.” 

Moses says he can’t provide an estimate of how much money or downtime that and more predictive maintenance have saved because “it’s still a little early for us to realize dramatic results across the facility.” But, he says, significant downtime has been avoided.

Curb Unexpected Downtime
Money saved by reducing unexpected downtime is difficult to quantify. Preventing downtime may require new equipment, better maintenance of older equipment, more analysis of existing workflow systems and, in some cases, more training of press operators and maintenance crews.

The latter was the case for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. To keep presses running smoothly despite consolidation of press and post-press operations into one plant, the newspaper was proactive and trained its staff to prevent unexpected downtime.

In July 2007, The Republic ceased printing at one of its two production plants, shutting down three of its seven Goss presses, and two months later, it ended mailroom operations there. Now all press and post-press operations are at its Deer Valley, Ariz., facility.

The consolidation also meant working with four presses instead of seven, increasing the chances of unscheduled downtime, says Robert Kotwasinski, vice president of production. Press operators and maintenance crews from the shuttered Mesa, Ariz., plant had to learn new equipment—the Mesa plant had Goss Metroliners and Headliners while the Deer Valley plant had newer Goss Colorliners—and a new way of operating at Deer Valley, subsequently increasing the chance of mistakes.

To prevent unscheduled downtime, some of the 150 Mesa staffers received refresher press training, and the operations department reviewed and updated its standard operations procedures, Kotwasinski says.

“We have not had any major failures or extended downtime on our equipment since the move to printing at only one location,” he adds. 

At the Chicago Tribune, simply doing maintenance put off for two years reduced unscheduled downtime due to web breaks.

In 2004, the newspaper added 4-over-4 MAN Roland (www.manroland.com) ColorMAN towers to its 10 Goss presses but because of its aggressive print schedule “couldn’t get enough downtime to do the press maintenance that we needed,” says Tom Beilke, senior manager of maintenance. This year, the Tribune spent 11 months doing overdue maintenance checks and made changes.

“We went through the reel tension paster systems and returned them to Goss specifications,” Beilke says. “It improved web break performance and reduced downtime. Our downtime due to equipment related failures has been reduced by 20 percent year over year as a result of our completing the majority of our backlogged equipment repairs. Our web break performance has improved on average by 50 percent year over year.”