The Road to 50 Inches

Reducing newsprint web widths isn't easy, but common pitfalls can be avoided.

by W. Eric Schult

Normally, if you take something away from readers or advertisers, you can expect to hear about it—in spades.

So the composing team left today’s crossword puzzle out of the paper? Brace yourself for the caller whose coffee break you just ruined. You say a weekly coupon insert ran short, causing missed deliveries? Expect a call from the supermarket manager, asking how many cases of unsold cereal to dump on the publisher’s driveway.

Customers are extremely sensitive to reductions in service. Is it any wonder, then, that we wring our hands over reducing the size of our product?

We speak, of course, of the widespread migration to a narrower format for broadsheet newspapers. We’re not talking about an incremental trim like the one many newspapers made in the mid-1990s, when soaring newsprint prices prompted barely perceptible cuts. Despite stable newsprint prices (more or less), a new set of pressures has prompted the industry to implement a more substantial reduction—this time to 50-inch webs, or 12 1/2-inch-wide pages.

How quickly and universally the industry embraces the narrower format remains to be seen, but momentum is playing into the equation. With many large-market papers such as the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post having taken the lead, a substantial chunk of the country’s total daily newspaper circulation already has trimmed down.

No one who has traveled the road to 50 inches claims to have had a smooth ride. Indeed, the sheer complexity of a web-reduction project virtually assures some potholes along the way.

Luckily, some intrepid explorers have traveled the road before you, and they have graciously offered these 10 tips to help keep your back out of a ditch.

Tip #1: Include All Affected Departments

“There’s so much more involved in this than just changing your press equipment,” cautions Robin Shank, director of print quality for the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, most organizational issues deal with players far from the pressroom and must be tackled weeks or months ahead of cutting down iron and paper.

Accordingly, the first step to avoiding web-reduction hassles is to move the organization’s thinking out of the pressroom.

“At first, we viewed our web reduction as a press issue,” says Stephen Schroeder, director of technology and pre-press at The Wenatchee (Wash.) World, an independent 26,063-circulation daily. “Soon we realized that every department is affected in some way.”

Schroeder subsequently assembled a project team that met twice a week for several months to identify issues, strategize, plan and implement the necessary changes in the paper’s format. The experience generated these words to the wise: “Don’t discount the involvement of any department. Even those with no obvious connection will be affected in ways you may not realize.”

Tip #2: Handle Image Size and Typography With Care

Determining the image size to print on narrower pages and whether to make type changes comes next. The image-width question has been at least partially answered by NAA’s late-winter recommendation of an 11 5/8-inch wide page image (see sidebar, p. 12).

Although imagesetters or anamorphic lenses can be set to scale pages horizontally as they are processed, few papers employ these as more than a temporary solution. In addition to distorting photos and line art, the practice can render small text, such as sports agate, classified liners and stock listings, difficult to read.

“The people who think they can go from 13 inches to 11 5/8 inches are really at risk in these categories,” Shank says. Los Angeles Times readers “didn’t like it when we were shrinking” pages on imagesetters, she says. Ever since the Times implemented a new typeface, however, “people can’t tell us what we changed, but they like how it looks.”

But typography changes also can be problematic. Consider The Oregonian in Portland, which undertook major typographical changes to avoid slicing editorial content along with page widths. “We changed not only the body copy, but also the leading,” says Carol Howard, computer-services director. “A little taken aback” by the response of focus groups, the editorial department “eventually tweaked [the leading], and the complaints disappeared.”

Sensitive to readability concerns, the Globe-Gazette, a 19,681-circulation Lee Enterprises daily in Mason City, Iowa, kept typographic tweaking to a minimum, deciding instead to employ editorial restraint. Reporters have to “write as concisely as possible,” says News Editor Bob Steenson. While there was “no overriding edict,” reporters were told that “if you can say it in 10 inches, don’t use 12.”

Steenson continues, “We haven’t cut the number of stories. More often, we’ve cut their length.”

Then there’s agate—“the biggest gotcha on the editorial side,” as Brad Ward, Lee’s production-systems specialist, puts it. “The point size already is so small.” Several Lee papers opted to reconfigure agate with one fewer column rather than tinker with the type.

Stock listings were problematic for The Journal Times, a 30,861-circulation Lee paper in Racine, Wis. Space between columns has been reduced so much that large fractions sometimes produce orphan lines of tabular data that have to be manipulated manually, adding five-to-15 minutes of additional work each day.

Other papers have undertaken wholesale redesigns in conjunction with reductions. In April, USA Today became the latest to introduce a narrower product and a redesign simultaneously. In Wenatchee, redesign preceded page reduction by a year, in part because the paper reduced cutoff as well as page width as part of a new-press installation and wanted to protect editorial content.

While the paper “took a hit” from readers on the redesign, Schroeder opines that the web reduction went over favorably because the dust had settled from the earlier changes. Because reproduction capability was enhanced by the World’s new KBA Comet single-width press, which went online last November, reader acceptance was pretty universal.

“In retrospect, it’s misguided to throw a redesign and reduction at readers simultaneously,” says Schroeder. “Don’t mess with what the readers are used to.”

Tip #3: Beware of Billing Problems

While NAA guidelines provide some stability in ROP column sizing, classified-section changes still are all over the map. Not only are the readability issues as sensitive as those involving sports agate and stock listings, but less obvious billing ramifications also require careful planning.

“We thought it would be really confusing for customers” if their ad was four lines on one day and five lines the next, explains Val Suby, the Globe-Gazette’s information-systems manager. Five weeks before conversion, the paper stopped selling liner ads in the wider-column measure and started floating narrower ads in the available space. That way, most of the wider ads expired before the conversion, and the few remaining ones could be special-rated and altered to fit.

Likewise, The Wenatchee World retained its eight-column layout and reset the columns to a new width without altering typography. “We chose to let [the narrower columns] drive the line count,” Schroeder says. It was “a way to drive some price increases.”

However, he says, Wenatchee was not adequately prepared for the bookkeeping ramifications. “Double-check the accounting side of the puzzle,” Schroeder cautions. “If you switch in the middle of the month, you’re going to have to grandfather” rates on ads that wind up spilling into extra lines.

For others, the goal was to avoid billing issues altogether by keeping ad text from reflowing. The El Paso Times had and still has a 10-column classified format. By adjusting indents and gutter widths, they avoided changes in font size and horizontal scaling of type—thereby avoiding readability concerns. “A three-line [ad] stayed a three line and a four-line stayed a four-line,” preventing billing issues, says Production Manager Gary Hughes. “It was a piece of cake.”

Other papers’ changeovers required more work. The Advocate and Greenwich Times, two Times Mirror papers in southwestern Connecticut, shrunk liners on their imagesetter, while display classifieds were built to the new column measure, output individually and pasted up on galley sheets, according to Bob Hughes, The Advocate’s vice president of production. For The Oregonian, adjusting classifieds kept a crew of 40 busy over a weekend. The paper maintained its existing font and type size, but changed the set width so liners wouldn’t reflow. “We called up every ad in the database and confirmed it was the same length,” says Howard.

Tip #4: Keep Display Advertisers in the Loop

With national and regional advertisers, ad agencies, and many local customers building their own ads—often in advance—it’s paramount that newspapers provide ample warning of column-width changes.

Neighboring newspapers, whose production departments often have cooperative ad-sharing agreements, also need to be consulted.

Many newspapers put their promotional muscle behind this part of the cutdown equation, alerting advertisers early and often. Above all, advertisers need to be educated that the value of their ad is not diminished by the web reduction. Though narrower, ads take up the same percentage of the page and have the same impact.

“If you’ve got a sensitive situation out there, they’re going to use it in rate negotiations,” Shank acknowledges. “Be upfront and stand firm.”

Tip #5: Remember to Convert Pick-up Ads

As for the ads themselves, the biggest technical challenge rests within display-ad databases, where ads built to old column sizes can linger through a conversion. In El Paso, the entire ad-production staff came in one Sunday to convert saved ads. The team ran database queries to identify which ads ran on which days. They first converted all of Monday’s ads, and then proceeded through the week.

To simplify the process, the paper bought 20 copies of a software ’XTension for their ad-building tool, QuarkXPress, which allows all elements in an ad to be resized with relative ease.

“[The process] was time-consuming,” Hughes admits, “but not as time-consuming” as it would have been otherwise.

The Journal Times took a day-by-day approach. Any new ad ticket with pick-up dates extending through the conversion period had to be built to both the new and old column measures, and then saved as EPS files into dated publication directories.

Tip #6: ‘Measure Four Times, Cut Once’

Only now do we get to the heavy-metal part of the equation. Variables here include the configuration and number of presses, units and folders; their age, model and manufacturer; whether contractors are needed, what their schedules might be (contractors are in demand right now); and various other particulars. Plateroom, and in some cases, conveyor and inserter adjustments need to be considered as well.

While her conversion project at the L.A. Times—which involved 16 presses in three counties—might seem mind-bogglingly complex, Shank has a great deal of respect for smaller papers undertaking reductions. “You have one press and one folder. If you lose that, you don’t print,” she says.

That became abundantly clear to Carl Simon, pressroom supervisor at The Journal Times. The contractor hired for the paper’s February cutdown made some bad assumptions based on cutdowns of Goss two-to-one folders it had previously performed at other papers.

“We basically relied on the fact that because it was a Goss 2:1 folder, it was the same as every other Goss 2:1,” Simon says. “That’s not necessarily true.”

In addition, a new roller top-of-former was built to the wrong specs and had to be rushed back for remilling. The paper converted on schedule, but had to improvise for several days until the replacement roller could be installed. The web configuration had to be diverted over the balloon former, a stumbling block for printing tabloids because the working configuration provided no means for slitting them. The paper had to shift the printing of its weekly total-market coverage product, the Pennysaver, to a sister paper.

To stress the importance of meticulous planning, Simon now advises, “Measure four times, cut once.”

Tip #7: Set Clear Expectations With Contractors

Working with contractors may save time and money, but it requires careful advance work.

“[Our vendor] expected me to have somebody in here with them” around the clock, says El Paso’s Hughes. “We didn’t even have that discussion.” Shop towels, too, turned out to be the customer’s responsibility, despite no mention of them in pre-site conversations. Get it all spelled out in advance, Hughes advises.

Contractors took a novel approach to cutting down the Times’ two Goss Metro presses, actually getting the presses to do some of the work for them. “We cut down the ink-pickup rollers on the press,” Hughes says. The contractor designed a jig that essentially turned press units into lathes, so rollers were machined to their new dimensions without being removed.

Tip #8: Handle the Reduction Like an Installation

Don’t underestimate the scope of press cutdowns, veterans advise. “You need to think of this project as a new-press installation,” says Hughes. He also urges publishers to allow time for test printing, as lockup work means that some units will need adjustment before registration can be brought back to acceptable tolerances.

Fred Sheets, chief machinist at The Oregonian, who has worked there 28 years and is a veteran of two previous cutdowns, had a comparatively large project on his hands.

“We almost rebuilt the presses,” he says. A total of 50 Goss Metro and Metroliner press units underwent substantial work leading up to a May 1999 conversion. Afterwards, he finished the job, swapping out ink rails and flicker blades.

In contrast, conversion of the Advocate’s Harris 1650 double-wide press was “fairly easy,” says Bob Hughes. The work entailed moving lockups, altering the platemaking equipment (the biggest component), and moving trolleys and nips on the folder. The go-live work on the paper’s two folders took three people 18 hours, requiring some production accommodations.

“The first couple of days, we limited the amount of color,” giving the cutdown crew a comfortable window to work on each press unit, Hughes says. Total costs, he estimates, were $50,000.

Tip #9: Prepare to Clean Up

Cleanup, too, is easy to underestimate. El Paso press crews put down cardboard to protect the pressroom floor and still “ink got everywhere—places you wouldn’t even think ink could get,” Gary Hughes says. He brought in two shifts of workers just to tidy up and then had his pressroom repainted.

Cleanliness issues also prompted Hughes to cut down 322 rubber rollers over a 12-day period—an optional change that prevents “throwing water and ink all over the inside of the units,” he says. By doing the work in-house at a cost of about $9 per roller, the Times saved the $150 per-unit replacement cost.

Tip #10: Manage Your Newsprint Inventory

So the press is cut down and everything from classified column widths to editorial typefaces have been nailed down.

It’s Miller Time, right?

In a perfect world, perhaps. But the world isn’t perfect, and chances are you now will have to deal with anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or more of leftover newsprint.

While some presses and folders—especially ones geared for commercial work—can alternate among substantially different web sizes, for the rest of us those 54- or 55-inch rolls are about as useful as yesterday’s newspaper.

Papers that “don’t have a place to send [spare rolls] at a break-even price may have to look at writing them off,” cautions El Paso’s Hughes.

Group-owned papers have what would seem a built-in advantage in finding a home for their excess inventory, but not always. While El Paso is a Gannett paper, not all Gannett properties—even those still running 54-inch webs—use the same diameter roll or core size. So Hughes had to ship 14-to-18 truckloads of newsprint all the way to Palm Springs, Calif., incurring “a lot of freight costs.”

Two months after its February web conversion, the Journal Times still was warehousing much of its old stock. Some excess inventory was sent to a sister property that fortuitously ran short of 54-inch rolls just before its own web reduction, but Simon still was stuck with an array of three-quarter rolls, which he plans to “burn up on a spadia around the [Sunday] comics.”

But even a larger group like Gannett, on an ambitious timetable to convert most of its papers by year’s end (see sidebar, p. 10), might find properties on the tail end having trouble unloading excess newsprint.

Don’t expect your supplier to take it back, either. Even if you’re willing to pick up the freight and pay a restocking fee, this approach is not practical, cautions one paper manufacturer. And while secondary or tertiary markets might take your excess newsprint, don’t count on getting market price for it.

Hughes identifies two ways to deal with the problem. “Start managing newsprint three months out,” and watch it closely all the way to conversion, he says. That, or “get in there with a hacksaw blade and cut down those rolls,” he jokes.

While careful planning by warehouse manager Clem Brandt helped The Oregonian hit the mark dead-on, Sheets warns that even the best planning is subject to forces outside your control. “Hopefully, the editors won’t come up with a brainstorm” for a new, previously unplanned section, he quips.

Now for the good news. Without exception, web-reduction veterans say their customers—even the ones who call about bungled crossword puzzles or missing inserts—find little in the narrower product to complain about.

“People actually like the size better,” says Schroeder. “You hear other papers that have been through web reductions say that, and it’s easy to disbelieve. The funny thing is, it’s absolutely true.”

And senior management equally relishes the prospect of saving up to 7 percent of total newsprint consumption (though increased paging often eats into that figure, bringing the total at several large papers closer to 2-to-4 percent).

While national and regional advertisers still must dabble with dimensional specs from paper to paper, a new irony might arise as more papers make the switch. Imagine getting this call from your biggest department-store account: “Won’t you please end my agony and switch from that old image width? My dresses are petites and your oversized pages are attracting the [ahem] full-figured market!”

Well, maybe not. But for once, publishers find themselves in the enviable position of taking something away from their customers that actually makes most of them happy.

Schult is the production manager for the Journal Times in Racine, Wis. E-mail, wes@wi.net; phone, (262) 631-1739.

Sources

Carol Howard and Fred Sheets, The Oregonian, 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, Ore. 97201. Howard’s e-mail, carolh@syst.oregonian.com; phone, (503) 221-8327.

Bob Hughes, The Advocate, Box 9307, Stamford, Conn. 06904, (203) 964-2464.

Gary Hughes, El Paso Times, Box 20, El Paso, Texas 79999. E-mail, ghughes@elpaso.gannett.com; phone, (915) 546-6182; fax, (915) 546-6456.

Dick Johnston and Carl Simon, The Journal Times, 212 Fourth St., Racine, Wis. 53403, (262) 634-3322.

Stephen Schroeder, The Wenatchee World, Box 1511, Wenatchee, Wash. 98807. E-mail, schroeder@wenworld.com; phone, (509) 664-7127.

Robin Shank, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053. E-mail, robin.shank@latimes.com; phone, (213) 237-6302; fax, (213) 237-0712.

Bob Steenson and Val Suby, Globe-Gazette, Box 271, Mason City, Iowa 50402, (515) 421-0500.

Larry Urrutia, Gannett Co., 1100 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Va. 22234. E-mail, lurrutia@gci1.gannett.com; phone, (703) 284-6659; fax, (703) 247-3189.

Brad Ward, Lee Enterprises Inc., 215 N. Main St., Davenport, Iowa 52801. E-mail, brad_ward@lee.net; phone, (319) 383-2156; fax, (319) 383-2104.

Cutdown Resources

Download copies of NAA’s recommended 50-inch advertising dimensions, two Microsoft Excel files calculating different column widths and potential consumption changes, and a partial list of newspapers that have converted to 50-inch webs from www.naa.org/technology/pressweb.
The Wenatchee (Wash.) World has information about its web-reduction process on its World Wide Web site. Request a password to view the information at www.wenworld.com/press.html.
NAA operates a listserv-style online forum on web-width reduction. To sign up, employees of NAA-member papers can visit e-forum.naa.org/#technology.

Cookie Cutting

If there were a cookie-cutter approach to completing a web-reduction project, newspaper groups would have found it by now.

Instead, the strategic decision to cut typically is made at the central office, while individual properties are tackling the logistics themselves. Different groups, however, do offer their papers varying degrees of assistance or direction.

At Arlington, Va.-based Gannett Co., Director of Manufacturing Larry Urrutia is working with his corporate classified and editorial counterparts to guide some 70 Gannett properties through the process by year’s end. The first of Gannett’s papers converted last July.

“From an iron perspective,” that is, making the mechanical adaptations in the pressroom and packaging center, Urrutia says Gannett used three very different properties as guinea pigs to learn what it could before broadening the scope of web reduction groupwide. Gannett selected one site with a single-width press, one with a double-width press and a third with multiple double-width presses. In some respects, papers with one double-wide proved the hardest.

“It becomes a challenge when you only have one press” and have to fit in the mechanical work without a second machine to fall back on, he says.

Luckily for Gannett, a “good number” of remaining sites have single-width presses, where changing from a 27-inch or 27 1/2-inch web to a 25-inch web requires minimal press and folder adjustments and a substantially reduced initial investment, Urrutia says. On a double-width press, which employs 54-inch or 55-inch newsprint rolls to produce a standard broadsheet, the reduction to 50 inches is something else entirely.

Davenport, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises found considerable cost differences retrofitting double-width presses and folders. “It varies so much from paper to paper,” says Dick Johnston, publisher of The Journal Times. Press modifications at the Racine, Wis., daily topped $160,000, while a sister paper, the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal, expended “less than $30,000” to cut down its own double-wide press, according to Publisher John Vanstrydonck.

Johnston has no qualms. “The payback is fast. We’ll get back $180,000 in the first year.” As for the Rapid City Journal, “we don’t have to calculate a return on investment,” Vanstrydonck says, because costs are expected to be recouped in a matter of months.

The most uniform part of converting Lee’s 22 dailies was that many shared the same classified front end. Subsequently, corporate guidance was available, though differences arose from paper to paper in such areas as classified-column count, typography and image width—not to mention how each paper intended to handle liner-ad reflow and subsequent billing issues.

The only common practice some chains are able to employ is providing alternate sites for excess newsprint inventory (see p. 14). This avoids the plight many independent papers will face: selling excess inventory on the secondary market at a loss.

Guiding Rules

So you’ve decided chop your page width to 12 1/2 inches. What next?

The thorny question of image size prompted many newspapers that underwent conversions in 1999 to select varying page-image widths. The reason? Incremental web cuts in the mid-1990s allowed publishers to stay with the longstanding 13-inch standard (albeit with trolley marks occasionally entering the image area). But later moves to 50 inches made maintaining the old standard impossible, prompting a range of image sizes and a cry for new guidelines.

In February, NAA’s Board of Directors approved a new recommended image width, but it remains just that—a recommendation.

The recommended 11 5/8-inch page-image width is designed for use on a 12 1/2-inch page and includes six columns with 1/8-inch gutters. That’s smaller than the current 13-inch standard, based on a 13 3/4-inch page, but larger than the 11 1/2-inch width originally recommended by an Association task force (TechNews, March/April 2000, p. 7).

Why no new standard? It’s in part an acknowledgment that the industry will likely continue printing on a mix of narrow and wide webs for years to come. Also, it acknowledges that some publishers who selected different image widths in advance of the guidelines may not be willing to redesign again. Accordingly, the Association also coined a term for individual papers’ preferred ad-submission sizes—PASS.

For the record, NAA’s Board is not recommending that its 50-inch guidelines replace current Standard Advertising Units, nor is it advocating an industry-wide move to narrower webs. The guidelines simply “are designed to help newspapers and advertisers work with reduced page sizes,” says NAA President and Chief Executive Officer John F. Sturm.