Ed Lehr has been thinking about the possibility of newspapers getting more national-ad dollars since hearing a speech by Pat Haegele, president of the Newspaper National Network, who said the largest obstacle to that desirable end is consistent color. And Lehr, the new technology manager for the Saint Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, is doing something about it.
Lehr, Knight-Ridder Corp. and NAA are all trying to find out whether color profiles will allow a single ad to be accurately reproduced at paper after paper--even papers using different types of presses.
A double-truck BMW ad built by the Fallon McElligott agency and the Color House pre-press shop was printed on St. Paul's Goss Metroliner offset presses and the Duluth (Minn.) News-Tribune's MAN Roland flexo presses. No changes were made to the ad. The results?
"During the Duluth press run, people became confused between which was the St. Paul tear sheet and which was the one from Duluth," says Lehr.
Later, the ad was rerun without the color-profiling software. "The car was reflecting the sky, and it turned purple," says Lehr.
As this story went to press, a color profile was being set up for testing at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. "If the results continue to be positive, we're going to move to The Miami Herald and do the same thing," says Lehr. "As one of the instigators of the project, I'm obviously terribly biased--but it is going to work."
The Knight-Ridder profiles are being built using spectrophotometers to set the color, densitometers to measure ink-film thickness, and Color Solutions software, says Lehr.
"We're trying to build a system that will interface with the real world," says Lehr, who has been working on the project in St. Paul with his partner, Richard Grounds from marketing. "Clearly, the object is not to confine this to Knight-Ridder," says Lehr, who is chairman of the Color Management Work Group within NAA's Newspaper Color Reproduction Quality Task Force (see related story, Color Gurus Convene).
The Color Management Work Group held a color-management software "bake-off" in Chicago on Nov. 13. Invited software vendors were Adobe, Agfa, Apple Computer, Candela Color Synergy, Color Solutions, Helios, Imation, Kodak, Linotype-Hell, Logo, Monaco Systems, Praxisoft and Willowsix. TechNews will report on the proceedings in its next issue.
Chris Feola is the News Systems Editor at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American. His E-mail address is cjfeola@aol.com.
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