Training’s New Dimension

A tight labor market, aging workforce and more sophisticated equipment have made training all the more important. New programs and philosophies can help.

by Randy Woods

Some years ago, Chuck Blevins was assistant production director for a Gannett Co. paper in New Jersey that had installed a new press. One morning, the press was shut down while crews were trained by the manufacturer reps to operate the controls. “I noticed,” he says, “that all the parameters on the press were in their perfect, premier settings the whole time.”

When the crews broke for lunch, Blevins threw them a curve by fiddling with the ink settings. When they started their test run after lunch, the crews immediately noticed the ink-water balance was off. The rest of the day, he says, was spent figuring out how to get everything back into alignment.

“They never got done with their run that day,” recalls Blevins, now an independent consultant in Vienna, Va. “It really irritated the managers, but at least the trainees learned something about real-life press problems.”

That’s the true test of a well-trained press operator, Blevins argues–the ability to think on your feet and fix the inevitable snafus. “Nine times out of 10, if there’s a complaint about a press operator, it’s because he can’t resolve problems when they come up,” he says.

It’s a common complaint throughout all areas of newspaper production (see sidebar, below), but nowhere is the need for adequately trained workers greater than in the pressroom. As veteran press crews thin due to workforce reductions and retirements, a new generation of more sophisticated machinery is entering newspaper facilities–and often, without a new generation of operators to run it.

The good news? Training efforts for press crews are much better today than they were 10 years ago, Blevins says. The bad news? “We still invest less, per capita, in training than any other major industry,” he says.

“In smaller shops, the press operators only learn from other press operators,” says Frank Bourlon, executive director of the Newspaper Production and Research Center, a pressroom-training facility in Oklahoma City. And at larger papers, traditional apprenticeship programs appear to be in decline, says Ron Chiavaro, director of pre-press and quality assurance for Newsday in Melville, N.Y. “They used to be four years long, and you went to school every night. You had to really make it a part of your life,” he says.

More press operators are promoted from within to the managerial level, despite the lack of apprenticeship experience. “It’s becoming difficult to train who you need to train,” Chiavaro adds. “You need to have a mentor; you need real experience. There’s a big enough pool of skilled workers right now, but in 10 years, who’s going to train the next group?”

The combination of tight budgets, lack of sustainable training programs and an ever-shrinking pool of qualified labor already contributes to present-day problems, says Tom Shafer, president of the newly created CMYK University in Millersburg, Pa.

“I can describe the situation in two words,” he says. “Dire need.”

Time + Money = Limitations

The two main training limitations newspapers face come from those all-too-common bedfellows, time and money. In an industry that must pump out continuous product on a 24/7 schedule, it’s hard for managers to set aside time for crews to sit down and discuss ink theory.

As the industry weathers the current economic slowdown, both time and money are becoming all the more scarce. Maintenance and training are first to go at most newspapers during budget-crunching times, Shafer says.

But “as the quality of operators goes down, you wind up paying a lot more in newsprint waste,” Bourlon argues. “That’s one of the biggest cost factors in newspapers these days.” Poorly trained workers lead to more mistakes, he says, leading in turn to millions of dollars in advertising make-goods for various printing errors.

At The Toronto Star, Tom Adair, the paper’s pressroom training manager, has convinced management that a well-trained worker is money and time well spent. “As long as training can make the pressroom and the Star more efficient, I know I’ll have support from the top,” he says.

With six 12-unit presses from MAN Roland Inc. of Westmont, Ill., running three shifts seven days a week, the Star is one of the world’s largest newspaper operations. Yet it has managed to institute a comprehensive apprenticeship program, plus an ongoing retraining schedule for its 200 pressroom workers.

Trainees apply for apprentice press operator/journeyman positions and receive four years of instruction, plus four weeks of introductory training before they begin work, Adair says. They receive six months of training the first year and then are pulled out for job-specific training over the remaining three years in four basic modules: blankets and installing, rollers and settings, color setting and densitometry, and production and maintenance.

The Dallas Morning News also has found time to develop a new training program it calls the Academy of Production Management. The program will become operational in “the very near future,” focusing on machinists, technical specialists, electricians and press operators, says Paul Webb, the paper’s vice president of production.

Intended for supervisors, the 22-month program consists of one-day classes held every two months. The twist, Webb says, is that the trainees have to report back on how they implement each module. “Often, we send people off for training, but there’s never any follow-up to see if they actually learned anything,” Webb says. “This way, we’ll be able to see how effective the training is.”

Last year the Morning News embarked on a transatlantic training course after ordering a new, Swiss-manufactured press from WIFAG of Marietta, Ga.

The press contract included a provision to fly press operators to Switzerland for individual, hands-on training. A group of 16 operators made the journey twice–for a two-week session and a seven-week session.

“We sent four to five operators at a time as our presses were being built, so they could address problems as they arose,” Webb says.

Training consisted of a combination of classroom and pressroom work. Operators learned how to perform diagnostic tests and equipment repairs in class, then assisted in the actual construction of the paper’s press, folder and printing units, “so they knew how all the pieces were put together,” Webb adds.

Later, as part of an in-house “train the trainers” program, WIFAG’s Swiss instructors flew to the United States to make sure the Dallas crews were up to speed.

One key to success was having the cost of the training included in the press contract so it would be difficult to cut. Even when that’s not an option, “when you prepare budgets and they want to cut back on training, you have to say, ‘We have to do this–this is the cost if we don’t,’” Webb says.

Not Just for Birdcages

Though newsprint is often considered the ultimate throwaway, customers are becoming increasingly finicky about the product’s quality. Advertisers demand more color each year and have become savvy about the subtleties of color selection, dot-gain and proper registration.

“Print quality is such a big issue these days,” Adair says. “Customers want magazine-quality printing, even on newsprint. You have to stress the importance of equipment maintenance, and optimizing your ink and water balance pre-sets.” That, in turn, requires an intimate knowledge of specific equipment and its many idiosyncrasies.

To improve quality, newspapers need to resist the one-size-fits-all training packages that have been popular in the past, Blevins argues, and concentrate instead on customizing their programs. “I don’t like to see crews getting caught up in going off-site for training,” he says. “The trainer will say, ‘We’ll customize the curriculum when the crews get here.’ That means they don’t understand that particular operation in the first place.”

More and more often, the first thing training professionals talk about is a needs assessment, says Blevins. It’s a new concept in many pressrooms, but one that can lead to better, more tailored training. One example can be found in Toronto, where Adair and his staff have taken two years to write a set of standard operating procedures. The Star’s “Press Operators Handbook” lists the basic parameters for equipment maintenance and production, based on press crews’ feedback and task analysis in such areas as folding, setting tension and adjusting rollers.

“We ask [operators] to take an extra moment to measure a particular problem, look at it, think about the best way to solve it and then act on it, rather than just doing whatever they did in the past,” Adair says.

“We just want to teach them about why they do what they do,” he adds. “It may take an extra 10 minutes–and the crews don’t have a lot of time to stop and think during a press run–but the results will be better.

“For example,” he adds, “if a pressman sees some scumming during a run, he may automatically add more water to the ink because that’s what he had always done before. It’s just human nature. We want to point out that the [ink-water] balance is more important than how they perceive it looks–in other words, set it to a standard.”

To help satisfy the insatiable need for color, the Star embarked on a separate program to master “not just light and dark, but to understand the science and psychology of color–how each [person’s] eye perceives color differently,” Adair says.

The paper found a partner in the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, which customized its color workshops to meet the needs of the Star’s production schedule. A program of 16 workshops, each lasting two days, was developed to focus on basic color facts, ink-water balance, densitometry, and the measurement and control of color.

The newspaper industry is beginning to espouse these types of modern management principles, says Ken Columbia, NAA’s newly hired director for industry staff development. By studying the industry’s best practices, the Association is in the process of developing generic training guidelines for press operators.

“We want to develop a career path for certain newspaper positions–sort of a training pipeline,” Columbia says. “We want to determine what training is needed at what skill level, and ask where we will be in five years.”

Back to School

For smaller papers without the resources to develop their own training programs, the list of educational options is growing.

The newest one is Shafer’s CMYK University, which opened last October. Formerly an executive with Thomson Newspapers, Shafer saw a need to train and recruit qualified press operators. After Thomson sold most of its newspaper holdings last year, Shafer partnered with Harrisburg, Pa.-based Dauphin Graphics Machines to supply classroom and press labs (TechNews, November/ December 2000, p. 27).

CMYK offers six press-operator classes, each one week long. Topics include double-width presses, beginning press operation, advanced operation, quality control, equipment maintenance, developing certification and “train-the-trainer” programs.

“We’ve been asked to take the show on the road–put a bunch of computers in a portable lab and focus on pre-press issues,” Shafer says. “Perhaps next year we’ll do it if we can put on a decent show and keep the quality up.”

For another, hands-on approach, there’s NPRC, run by Bourlon, his son and a secretary.

Since 1967, the small nonprofit school has offered several courses on beginning, intermediate and advanced press operation for most types of presses. Most courses last one-to-two weeks, but two-to-three-day classes also are available. According to Bourlon, NPRC is the only press-operator program offering hands-on training on both a double-width letterpress and a single-width offset press.

Bourlon travels to newspapers if crews can’t get to Oklahoma City. “We prefer to get [papers] to come to us,” he says. “It takes the crews totally out of the pressroom and allows us to monopolize their time.” Bourlon often goes back to the client’s newspaper after training is complete to make sure the crews correctly implement what they learned.

Not all of NPRC’s instruction is hands-on. “We also do some theory,” Bourlon says. “You have to understand the equipment before you get out on the floor to use it.”

West Virginia University’s Institute of Technology is one of the few major universities that still offers degrees in press operation. “As far as I know, we’re the only college teaching newspaper [printing],” says Jack Nuckols, head of the WVU program, based in Montgomery, W.Va.

The school offers a two-year Associate of Science degree, a one-year certificate in newspaper printing, and several weeklong vocational courses for individual newspaper crews.

In classes of six-to-12 people, WVU teaches two basic courses on single-width web presses and equipment maintenance, as well as an advanced course on color controls popular with small and medium-size dailies. “An awful lot of single-width papers want to make their color look like USA Today,” Nuckols says.

As a final training task, the school dummies up several proofs for a color run. “We also try to take a picture of each group and use that as a photo on the front page,” Nuckols adds. “Since it’s their own faces, it gives them a bit more incentive to get the register correct–and gives them a nice little souvenir when they’re done.”

Technology and Turnover

One of the more sweeping changes in the pressroom in the last few decades has been the rapid pace of new, highly automated technology. However, with new efficiency comes a noticeable drop in the number of openings for skilled press operators.

For instance, when The Plain Dealer in Cleveland completed its $200 million production and distribution system about five years ago, the number of press operators needed to run the new Goss Colorliner offset presses dropped from 150 to 75.

“While the new system was being built, we used the new facility as a training press,” says Bill Calaiacovo, the Plain Dealer’s human resources and labor relations director. After construction was finished, the paper offered an employee-buyout program to whittle the staff down to 75 workers. Nearly everyone who was let go, he says, was at or near retirement age.

With similar scenarios unfolding all over the country, many newspapers are facing tough questions about their aging workforces. Though many of the oldest employees will eventually retire, a significant number of press operators with decades of experience–and decades left to go in their careers–are facing a new and steep learning curve.

Stubbornness remains a problem. “There’s still a lot of ‘old school’ thought out there,” says one pressroom manager. “Usually, [workers] 35-and-under tend to accept the need for training. But many of the older workers, who are all in their late 40s, have a little more resistance. They’ll say the new information is ‘interesting,’ but then they slowly slide back into doing it the way they had always done it.”

Many older workers, however, seem to embrace change, Calaiacovo says. “We really didn’t get much resistance from older press crews,” he says. “We were really surprised at that. They saw training as a positive thing and an investment in their futures.”

A slow phase-in of training programs well in advance of the new facility’s startup made the transition easier, Calaiacovo says. “We didn’t force-feed them.”

“Initially,” Webb says of the Morning News’ training program, “we had some of the [older crews] say, ‘I’m trained already.’ But after we selected a few others that were more open to new ideas, we got the rest of the crews interested by word of mouth.”

In some cases, the key to training older crews can be the approach: “It’s not so much training as it is getting a feel as to why the system works the way it does,” Webb says.

New Blood?

So what happens when all the old-timers finally retire? There’s always a new group of young turks eager to take their places, right?

Well, maybe not. At the moment, the industry is being hit with something of a double-whammy–as its skilled workforce ages and retires, newspapers are simultaneously having trouble finding qualified people to replace them. Recent, technology-driven staff cuts have decreased the number of openings, but in the next few decades, many newspapers may face a major labor crisis.

“In the last five to 10 years, a lot of papers have downsized dramatically,” Calaiacovo says. But “the cycle of retirement and attrition has caught up with the downsizing. We stand to lose a significant number of people here in the next 10 to 15 years.” The Toronto Star will see a 60 percent turnover in the pressroom over the next 10 years, mostly through retirement, Adair adds.

“It’s not so much the new technology that’s the problem,” says CMYK’s Shafer. “We just can’t find good press operators anymore. It’s hard to find people who come out of high school wanting to go into this industry.

“Let’s face it–it’s a dirty job,” Shafer admits. “The pay isn’t terrible, but you have bad hours, like the midnight to 8:00 [a.m.] shift, or 11:00 [p.m.] to 7:00 [a.m.], and you have to work holidays to boot.” Lower compensation has also hurt morale, according to Bourlon. “Now you can see pay for a single-width press operator at about $6 to $7 an hour,” he says.

“Why do all that when they can go to McDonald’s and get nearly the same pay, more flexible hours and a free hamburger for lunch every day?” asks Webb.

Shafer advises, only half-jokingly, that when looking for trained press operators, “make sure there’s a cemetery plot in town” with the operator’s name in it, so he or she has a reason to stick around.

There’s also the touchy subject of a perceived class division in pressroom work. The Dallas Morning News’ production center, for instance, is located in an upscale community where 90 percent of high-school graduates go to college, Webb says. “The nearest so-called blue-collar base of labor is 20 miles from us,” he says.

“A lot of people coming out of high school are not thinking about trades; they’re looking to white-collar jobs, where the money is good,” Calaiacovo adds. “I think there’s a lack of knowledge about the opportunities available within the newspaper field.”

The Plain Dealer, Dallas Morning News and Toronto Star all try to promote pressroom positions at job fairs, offering whatever incentives they can come up with. Often, training becomes a key selling point: “The biggest carrot we can offer is to provide employees with development opportunities–to show employees that if they stay with us, they will get more in return than if they move on,” Calaiacovo says.

“But it’s hard to get people motivated,” Adair admits. “Training enhances skills and makes a better press operator, but it’s still sometimes looked at as just another job.”

21st Century Training?

As with most industries, many of the new advancements in pressroom training seem to be based on “virtual” or “distance” learning, via the Internet or classroom simulators.

“This business cannot be accused of embracing high-tech, but there are a few things going on,” Blevins says, noting the emergence of press-simulation software. “Right now,” he says, ” [simulators] are not much more than ‘gee-whiz.’ They’re also a bit pricey, so it’ll take a real buy-in from the production executives to get them off the ground.”

The Dallas Morning News bought press simulators for its new WIFAG presses last year. “They’re helpful because they tell you immediately how successful you are,” Webb says.

“The disadvantage with simulators is that you don’t get an exact copy of your console,” Bourlon counters. “You can get a pretty good visual idea of what it’s like, but you can’t really get a good feel of it.”

At the NPRC, there’s talk of setting up distance-learning programs, “but right now, I can’t see how we can generate revenue,” Bourlon says. In the meantime, Bourlon is about “80 percent complete” on plans to set up specific programs to e-mail large training files to clients in advance of a press-training course.

At WVU, the focus is on upgrading the technology used to train. “By 2002, we plan to have a direct-to-plate system,” Nuckols says. “Most small to medium-sized newspapers still use traditional negative-to-plate systems, so this is still very new. It’s really going to change the way training is done.”

While it’s unclear whether high-tech approaches will beat out traditional apprenticeships and tools over time, newspapers can’t afford to wait to ramp up training programs.

“Everyone’s struggling to find the magic bullet of training,” Blevins says. “I’ve never heard anyone who’s satisfied with what they find. I’m not sure what the real answer is, but I guess it’s like chicken soup when you’re sick–it’ll make you feel better, and it can’t really hurt.”

Woods is a Seattle-based free-lance writer. E-mail, doonser@seanet.com.

Sources:

• Frank Bourlon, Newspaper Production & Research Center, 236 N.E. 31st St., Oklahoma City, Okla. 73105, (405) 524-7774; fax, (405) 524-7784.
• Bill Calaiacovo, The Plain Dealer, 1801 Superior Ave., Cleveland, Ohio 44114. E-mail, wcalaiac@plaind.com; phone, (216) 999-4258; fax, (216) 999-6356.
• Ron Chiavaro, Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Road, Melville, N.Y. 11747. E-mail, ron.chiavaro@newsday.com; phone, (631) 843-2252; fax, (631) 843-2280.
• Tom Shafer, CMYK University, Box 372936, Satellite Beach, Fla. 32937. E-mail, tom@opsfusion.com; phone, (866) 867-2695; fax, (321) 773-9101.
• Paul Webb, The Dallas Morning News, Box 655237, Dallas, Texas 75265. E-mail, pwebb@dallasnews.com; phone, (214) 977-6919; fax, (214) 977-8285.

TechNews Volume 7, Number 3: May/June 2001

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