Times Community Newspapers’ Growth Spurt
by Mark Toner
Across East Market Street from Leesburg, Va.’s immaculate court square sits the squat brick office of the Loudoun Times-Mirror. Much like the historic courthouse across the way, the horse carriage on the weekly’s sign and the hand-printing equipment in the window hint at a time when the paper of record in a county seat reigned supreme.
Welcome to the Old Dominion, the genteel Virginia of horse country and history.
But look again. Just a few miles down the highway from the historic court square, in a nondescript office campus surrounded by burgeoning suburbs, sits the headquarters of Internet giant AOL Time Warner.
Welcome to the New Dominion, home to the bustling Washington, D.C., technology corridor that has made Loudoun the third-fastest growing county in the nation. And for the Times-Mirror and its 17 sister publications, the challenge has been covering the new Virginia suburbs in a facility built for the old.
“Treading water” is how Allen L. Key, vice president of operations at Times Community Newspapers, describes the task. He arrived in Loudoun in 1985–coincidentally, the year AOL was founded. TCN had just four weeklies then, but even with country roads where suburban cul-de-sacs now stand, the area was growing, and the family-owned group was growing with it.
Indeed, weekly newspapers have become big business across the country. In the suburbs surrounding many cities, group ownership and strategic clustering have pushed combined circulation figures into the six-digit range. Big-city dailies are now building or buying their own clusters of weeklies. In the D.C. area, the only other large weekly group is owned by The Washington Post Co., which at presstime was adding still more papers to its stable.
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| Vintage printing equipment welcomes visitors to the Loudoun Times-Mirror in Leesburg, Va. With AOL and other local companies sparking explosive growth, the suburban weekly group plans to expand. |
With a combined weekly print run flirting with the quarter-million mark, Times Community Newspapers has squeezed every square inch of space out of its historic downtown facility. When it last expanded more than a decade ago, the company pushed iron within inches of walls and loading docks.
As the D.C. suburbs continue to grow, TCN continues to innovate. It was arguably the first U.S. newspaper company to move to 50-inch printing webs in 1997 and centralized classified operations more than a decade ago. More recently, it has embraced full pagination, scrapped its plateroom camera and migrated the first of its weeklies to all-digital photography.
With the company’s output expected to double again in the next five years, Key finds himself in a landlocked facility and a position any production manager would envy.
“It’s a wonderful problem to have,” he says. “We’ve outgrown the building.”
A Three-Day Daily
Once upon a time, a weekly newspaper’s press would run... well, once a week. Not anymore–and certainly not at Times Community Newspapers. From Tuesday to Thursday, “we’re like an 80,000-circulation daily,” Key says.
The weekly press run actually begins the previous Thursday, when advance sections roll off the group’s Goss Urbanite press. Early Monday, the real-estate and Weekender tabloids go on press, a job that continues through Tuesday morning. Later that day, the inside pages of the Times-Mirror and the Fauquier Times-Democrat, TCN’s largest paid-circulation papers, are printed, followed in the evening by several smaller free publications distributed in neighboring Fairfax County.
Then at 5:30 a.m. the following morning, it’s showtime. The A and B sections of the Fauquier paper are printed and trucked to a satellite packaging facility in Warrenton, Va., for assembly. They are followed by the A and B sections of the Loudoun weekly, which is packaged in-house, and then by several more Fairfax papers–a task that extends well into the evening.
Which brings us to Thursday, when the final weeklies are printed and ushered through the mailroom before the advance work begins anew.
By the time the week ends with a half day of maintenance on Friday, as many as 14 million printed pages have rolled off the press, according to Key.
“We’re going to get to the point where we have to run through the weekend,” he says.
Shuffling the Cards
Stepping past the hand press and other printing-industry relics that anchor the Times-Mirror lobby, little else is fixed in the company’s headquarters.
“We’ve been moving everything around,” Key says, walking a visitor through the thrice-expanded building. Stepping into the open newsroom/production area, the first group of workstations is home to TCN’s central art department, which handles all display advertising. Of the 200 to 250 display ads the papers receive weekly, 50 to 60 are now submitted digitally, Key says.
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| A view of the limited on-site newsprint storage through a unit of TCN’s eight-unit Goss Urbanite press hints at the cramped quarters in the weekly group’s production facility. |
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| Skids of inserts crowd TCN’s eight-into-one inserter. An earlier Kansa unit is now used in a satellite distribution center where two of the group’s 18 publications are packaged. |
Against a wall peppered with reminders about checking PDFs and proofs sits the central pagination team. Responsible for laying out all 17 weeklies, paginators are connected by T-1 lines and a common network to newsrooms in TCN’s four satellite offices–and to the Times-Mirror editorial staff that sits right behind them.
Editors working in the eponymous Xywrite word-processing program send paginators stories, which are dummied and laid out using Managing Editor Inc.’s Ad Layout System, QuarkXPress and a meticulous series of “rules of engagement” that ensure each paper maintains its own look. The Loudoun office also scans all images and processes the files that come in via disk from the Clarke Times-Courier’s digital cameras. A small IT office, classified, circulation and newly cleared space for the small Web-publishing group–TCN is a PowerAdz.com Zwire affiliate–rounds out the main floor.
Walking downstairs reveals how the building grew to accommodate each of the three presses used over the decades. The room where a sheetfed press once churned is used for skid storage and guarded by a giant mounted fish. The empty camera room still has a curtain leading to a darkroom unused since the group made the switch to full pagination six months ago.
“We made ourselves do it when we ripped the camera out,” Key says. Now pages churn out of ECRM imagesetters and plates from nuArc plate burners in adjacent rooms.
The cramped pressroom is dominated by the group’s eight-unit Goss Urbanite, but a casual glance at the floor reveals pins from the old six-unit Community press, which once sat perpendicular to the current press line. During the 1989 Urbanite installation, two units were removed from the Community, which continued running as the new press took shape and walls were shored up.
In the Community’s place sits the group’s limited newsprint storage. Long before “just-in-time logistics” became a buzzword, space constraints prompted TCN and newsprint supplier Bowater Inc. of Greenville, S.C., to develop a last-minute delivery plan. Today, three or four newsprint trucks roll in and out each week, though incoming rolls face a tight squeeze between the Urbanite’s reel stands and the loading dock.
“Two more inches, and you couldn’t get anything in,” Key says.
The mailroom faces a similar space crunch, with insert skids crowding the paper’s eight-into-one inserter from Heidelberg Web Publishing Systems of Dover, N.H. Installed at the same time as the Urbanite, the inserter boosted mailroom production from 4,000 to 12,000 copies per hour. Quipp stackers and Dynaric strappers round out the current mailroom; TCD’s old Kansa inserter continues to package two weeklies at the satellite mailroom in Warrenton.
“It was good enough for a little weekly, but try doing 250,000 copies [per week] on it,” Key says.
That sums up the problem with the plant as a whole. Though the building’s been expanded three times, TCN is now stuck–literally. Rights of way belonging to adjacent property owners border each end of the press line, making adding units impossible at a time when process-color capacity is limited to eight broadsheet pages or 16 tabloid pages.
“We are champing at the bit to go to 12 units,” says Key, noting that TCN already has to turn away four-color advertising. “But we have no place to go.”
Looking Ahead
Having watched Loudoun County explode around its landlocked facility for years, Times Community Newspapers is poised for change. The downtown building is now on the market, and a sale would bring with it the possibility of moving elsewhere in the city or county.
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| A plaque mounted on an antique hand press in the Times-Mirror’s lobby hints at the paper’s historic past. |
A more immediate challenge involves Loudoun County’s astonishing 1.2 percent unemployment rate, which has made the universal struggle to find skilled workers all the more pressing.
Maintenance is a particular problem, as the vendors that help smaller papers service equipment face similar personnel shortages, Key says, recalling a painful six-month delay on a critical rebuilding project caused by a resignation at a key supplier.
“Small companies need to try and form cooperatives to allow them to draw the talents of neighboring big-city newspapers,” Key says. He envisions an arrangement where smaller-market publishers would help pay the salaries of maintenance workers at nearby metro dailies, in return receiving technical assistance as needed.
Change has been a constant since Key first stepped into an oddly empty Dulles International Airport back in 1985. “I thought I was in the wrong place,” he recalls. “It was just country roads back then.”
As Times Community Newspapers grew, however, the horse carriage on its
sign out front was supplemented with a picture of an airplane, a homage
to the role Dulles plays in Loudoun’s booming economy. And who knows?
Maybe some day, the marquee of a new production center will feature, of
all things, an AOL disk. 
Toner is TechNews editor. E-mail, tonem@naa.org.