On October 22, 1995, Dow Jones & Co. experienced a production milestone--its previously all black-and-white Wall Street Journal ran a full color advertisement for Cadillac. Less than two months later, the Journal printed its first color cover of a special report.
Dow Jones made the decision to install process-color equipment in early 1994. Most of the equipment to produce quality dots already existed within the Journal's printing plants before the color project. But with 17 print sites, the paper needed to control variations in every step of the process. One quick solution was to eliminate half the variables by producing all page negatives at one place--the Journal's Color Lab in Chicopee, Mass.
For the Color Lab to supply negatives that would fit each print site's existing registration system would have been a logistical nightmare. A better choice was to change plateroom equipment to a standard punch configuration. The color lab now makes every negative with the image registered to a standard three-hole system.
Long before scheduling press installations, a choice of manufacturers and equipment had to be made. They included mixing Goss and TKS equipment, half-decks and four-color common-impression-cylinder units. After much research, the company chose Goss four-color CIC equipment for its Chicopee and South Brunswick plants, half-decks for its other Goss plants, and TKS half-decks and M-72 units for its TKS plants.
The color-equipment installations were performed almost exclusively by outside contractors. Press-Tec Inc. installed the TKS presses, while Masthead International installed the Goss. It took six weeks to prepare a given press, install the color units and then move on to the next plant.
A typical installation would find crews tearing a press apart before its final night of operation, leaving just enough intact to allow the press to run. Over the weekend, thousands of wires had to be removed, reinstalled or replaced. Around 100 tons of equipment was also removed, relocated and replaced.
To aid the press crew in keeping waste down while running process color, Dow Jones contracted Swiss-based ABB to install intelligent press controls. A separate system, manufactured by Parascan in England, scans films of the color pages in Chicopee and creates an ink-density representation. These density files are then stored on an ABB database to be recalled at a later print date. On the night of printing, the sites request density files from Chicopee which are downloaded via the corporate network. The values are translated at the printing site by the ABB press console into ink settings on the local printing press. The press crew can then preset the ink on the press.
The final step in the color project involved training production workers and advertisers in quality process-color reproduction. In 12 months, 730 employees and customers attended 46 classes.
Despite all the complexity involved in adding color to 17 separate print sites, all changes have been transparent to readers and no revenue has been lost due to lost capacity.
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