A Fault-Tolerant JOA
by Pete Wetmore
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| The San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which produces the city's two competing dailies, uses flexographic plates for printing. The agency opened the doors to its City Plant and downtown headquarters for Newspapers 2000 attendees. |
San Francisco is known for great food, heavy fog and two dueling newspapers operating under one roof: the San Francisco Newspaper Agency.
For now, the agency handles all non-editorial tasks for the 464,943 morning-circulation San Francisco Chronicle and the 101,630 evening-circulation San Francisco Examiner, both in the throes of a prolonged change in ownership. The complex production waltz the agency dances each day is made even more complicated as its flexographic presses—four lines in three locations—are converted to the paper-saving 50-inch web width.
It’s Monday of Newspapers 2000. As we sit on a Greyhound bus that will take us about three miles from the Moscone Center to the printing facility the agency calls the City Plant, quality-assurance coordinator Bruce Wahlberg outlines what this two-bus convoy of showgoers will see.
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| The City Plant's presses were built by Publishers Equipment, now KBA North America Web Press Division. The 75,000-square-foot facility opened in 1989. |
First, he notes, the City Plant is identical to the agency’s plant across the San Francisco Bay in Richmond, one of two East Bay production facilities. The City Plant and Richmond each have one press line with 21 units and four folders. The City Plant presses were made and installed in the late ’80s by Publishers Equipment Corp., now KBA North America Web Press Division of York, Pa. The Richmond presses were made by MAN Roland Inc. of Westmont, Ill.
The third plant, built in 1980 in Union City, is the largest, supporting all Sunday inserting and printing the daily Chronicle. Its two press lines, with three folders and 18 units, also were built by Publishers Equipment Corp.
All presses are flexo-graphic, the printing process that uses direct-impression flexible plates to lay down images directly onto newsprint. As the bus escapes downtown’s rush-hour traffic and gains speed on I-280 south, Wahlberg says, “We print the most flexographic newspapers in North America.”
Each year, the agency consumes more than 104,000 metric tons of newsprint and 3.6 million pounds of ink.
NAPP Systems Inc. of San Marcos, Calif., provides the flexible plates relied upon by flexo. The printing technology’s color re-production, advocates claim, is superior to offset, thanks in part to water-based inks with less ruboff than their oil-based offset counter-parts. The agency now is testing a new NAPP plate that promises even better color laydown and faster exposure times, Wahlberg says.
The 50-inch conversion project has been orchestrated to interfere as little as possible with production. Quality Parts & Service Inc. of Bridgeview, Ill., has from the end of the Sunday run to Wednesday morning to work on reconfiguring the City Plant presses for the new width. Print runs on the current 54-inch configuration are unaffected by the ongoing series of modifications to drag rollers, nipping-roller drive tubes and drives, and folder frames. In the final changeover, QPS will take down each folder for a period of days and convert it to handle 50-inch newsprint.
Our bus exits the freeway. After a couple of turns on city streets, we arrive at the City Plant, a low building constructed in 1989. Sheathed in grayish-blue metal siding, it covers 75,000 square feet. Its 11-year-old press lines, which include refurbished reel stands and folders, replaced letterpress units at SFNA’s Mission Street headquarters, still home to the agency and its two competing newsrooms.
As we wait for the second bus to arrive, white trucks bearing the Examiner logo dart into the facility every few minutes, their runs done for the day. A sign next to the exit gate reads, “Thanks for doing a great job.”
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| With color demand straining capacity limits, web leads on the City Plant's 11-year-old presses often stretch as far as 50 feet. Every edition is run collect. |
When it comes to printing color, doing that great job takes some ingenuity, Wahlberg says. When it was designed a dozen years ago, the City Plant was underconfigured for the coming flood of advertiser-demanded color, so some web leads now stretch to 50 feet to offer color positions. All editions are run collect.
The second bus arrives, and three tour groups form up. Ours goes last, following Wahlberg into a narrow white cinderblock hallway leading to the pressroom. The Publishers Equipment logo on each muddy green unit stands out at eye level. Overhead, tan-colored struts—scores of them—span the gap between press and building. They provide “seismic protection,” Wahlberg says—in the event of an earthquake, the press line would be held in place in a fervent attempt to prevent damage.
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| In the City Plant's reel room, robotic roll handlers guide newsprint rolls through tight quarters. |
We walk between two units. Next to a pair of exposed gears on one unit is QPS President Michael Schumacher. He stresses that work such as moving carriages closer together, cutting down shafts and replacing rollers with two grooves in them—one for each web width, old and new—is all done during press downtime. When a run nears, nothing his crew does interferes with getting the paper out the door.
Converting flexo is less complicated than offset, Schumacher says. “On flexo, you don’t have to go through all the hassle of changing the inking system” to accommodate the new width.
We move on, passing through the ink-stained quiet room and taking the stairs to the reel room. Tight quarters, these. Along the back wall, robotic roll handlers stand idle, their yellow strobes flashing. We pass them to look at the loading dock, where two trucks can deliver newsprint simultaneously.
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| Strapped for space, the City Plant facility has room for only 1.5 days' worth of newsprint. Trucks arrive day and night from a warehouse in Hayward. |
Both the space-strapped City Plant and Richmond have meager newsprint storage—no more than 1.5 days’ supply at a time. Trucks arrive day and night from a warehouse in Hayward. “Union City can take a whole lot more,” says Wahlberg. Union City also takes finished products in great quantities, as the other two plants pitch in to print Sunday’s edition. Some advance sections are even inserted beginning as early as Tuesday for distribution for the next Sunday.
As we leave the reel room, Wahlberg explains that the pump we hear is part of the flexo inking system. Whatever ink is not used is pumped back into holding tanks for cleaning and future use. The black-ink loop runs 24 hours a day.
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| A NAPP plate exposer is in one of the City Plant's three plate lines, each capable of producing 120 plates an hour. |
Waiting at our next station, the plate room, is Ed Bennett, a senior technical specialist from NAPP Systems. Standing before an eight-year-old NAPP Flex FX-IV5 plate exposer, Bennett explains that in flexo, each plate gets a “bump” exposure which “excites” the plate by eliminating oxygen and preparing it for imaging. The nine-minute process from exposure to press-ready plate includes a washout and curing, but no punch or bending—plates come pre-punched from NAPP and are held on the press magnetically.
Each of the agency’s three plate lines can handle 120 plates an hour, Bennett says. And because they’re flexo, there are no ink settings to be entered at the press; ink laydown is controlled through the density of the ink itself. Each plate can make 350,000 impres-sions. “The image quality is very good,” Bennett says.
Next on our tour is the ink conditioning area, where one tank holds 7,000 gallons of black ink and three others hold 500 gallons each of cyan, magenta and yellow. Ink, which is delivered as a “virgin” concentrate, is diluted with an equal amount of water in the first step toward giving it the proper viscosity for the press.
“We’re adding water all the time,” Wahlberg says. A bank of gauges shows how much ink is left in each tank, plus viscosity levels. Ink contaminated by paper dust or other impurities is sent to a settling tank, where the ink is separated from wastewater.
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| The City Plant mailroom features four lines of IDAB stackers. The brunt of the inserting takes place at an East Bay facility. |
As we enter the last room on our tour, the packaging area, Wahlberg says, “This isn’t a full-blown mailroom like Union City.” Conveyors run to four lines of IDAB 2000 stackers. All are idle on a Monday at this hour, but at midnight they’ll start handling the Chronicle, whose run of around 200,000 copies will end at about 3 a.m. At the nonstop Union City facility, he says, “our only down time is from 3 a.m. [Sunday] to the next Chronicle.”
Our City Plant tour ends, and the buses head for Mission Street. Traffic having let up, our ride back downtown is shorter than the ride out, although we have to pause while a dozen San Francisco police officers quell a disturbance on Sixth Street.
Just before we enter the Mission Street headquarters, Wahlberg stresses that the composing room is on deadline. “They’re going to be moving product out,” he says, so we’d be wise not to get in the way.
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| At the agency's Mission Street headquarters, composing largely remains in the domain of pageboards and wax. |
We take elevators up to the third floor. The building is cramped. One hallway is lined with front pages detailing the damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
“We’re everywhere we’ve got room,” Wahlberg says with a laugh.
The old-fashioned ambience is heightened by the scene in the composing room. No high-tech pagination environment, this: The room is populated by paper, wax, red-lined pageboards and compositors intent on closing the edition.
The obits page, adorned with red marks only printers and editors can decipher, appears ready to go. Nestled in with the death notices are today’s winning lottery numbers.
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| Three Crosfield page-facsimile machines transmit pasted-up and paginated pages to the agency's three printing sites. |
Our tour from composing on is swift. We pass through a stripping area dominated by light tables, then the Crosfield page-facsimile room where three machines transmit completed pages to the remote-printing sites. Paginated pages, such as section fronts, are sent as negatives and also go through the fax machines, now being upgraded with equipment purchased from the Los Angeles Times.
Our tour over, we walk out into a splendid San Francisco evening. Even in this city of fog, the San Francisco Newspaper Agency sees the way to send hundreds of thousands of newspapers across the Bay Area in a precisely coordinated manner.
Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pete@net-haven.net. Photos by Duncan Livingston, an Olympia, Wash., free-lancer.