- Everybody wants to stay downtown. Not everybody can.
- No two sites are the same--you have to make it up as you go along.
- You won't get a second chance.
- You will eventually get through it, but at the time, you won't think itpossible.
- There's an automated press-setting system and a proofing system that usescolor and density data as the page is transmitted via fiber-optic lines fromdowntown.
- Automated guided vehicles do everything from handle paper rolls to deliverfinished product to the trucks. During the planning phase, the Star usedcomputer modeling to figure out how the system would work.
- Everything's completely palletized: Inserts arrive on a skid and finishednewspapers leave the same way.
Wrangling Some Wiggle Room
by John Bryan
How seven newspapers weathered the ultimate operations challenge: building a new press facility
So you've convinced your publisher that you can't expand operations anyfurther, and you need more space.
It isn't that difficult to reach him, because the only place your desk fitsis in the executive washroom, and you see both him and the treasurer severaltimes a day.
So with a heavy sigh, they approve the spending of actual money, and youfind some land, plop down a foundation, put up a building, move every thing inand flip the switch. Piece of cake. Child's play.
In your dreams.
Nothing's ever been easy in newspaper production, and putting up aproduction facility is, to put it mildly, an adventure.
There seem to be four big principles to the art and science of new facilityconstruction:
We spoke with several newspaper production executives about the trials andtribulations of site selection, building construction, and managing thetransition between old and new. War stories? Success stories? Usually, they'reone and the same.
The New York Times
Everything about The New York Times' College Point production center ishuge, new and bleeding-edge.
But, says Vice President of Production David Thurm, don't underestimate thevalue of experience.
"Basically, College Point is the second phase--the first part wasbuilding the Edison, N.J., plant in 1987," he says. "The Edisonexperience gave us the opportunity to sit back and think about what we could dobetter. That was a great advantage."
But that didn't make it easy: Site selection, says Thurm, was verydifficult, taking seven or eight years.
"We walked away from several sites after the environmentalreview--essentially, they glowed in the dark," Thurm says. "We wanteda 40-acre site with rail, and we wound up with 31-acre site without rail. Butit's a very well-located place, and location is the most critical factor.
"It's on a prime north-south road and near a prime east-west road,"Thurm says. "Rail, we decided, wasn't a critical factor," since paperrolls were already being warehoused and trucked to the Times' 43rd Street site.
One of the things College Point lacked was stable soil.
"The soil was very poor," Thurm says, "with the geologicconsistency of chocolate pudding." That meant deep, deep foundations, with61 miles of pipe-piling driven down an average of 98 feet.
Meanwhile, Thurm was assembling a team of contractors to work with a vastnumber and variety of Times employees--300 by the time it was over--to plan theprocesses for the new plant.
They wound up with a facility that is more high tech than the Death Starfrom "Star Wars."
Using bar codes, for example, computers can identify the source mill andpapermaking machine for every newsprint roll.
"If we decide that such-and-such mill and such-and-such machine providethe paper that reproduces color best, we can direct the cranes to just thoserolls," says Thurm. "And if there's a web break, we can identify thepaper and where on the roll it broke."
You can get data like this from virtually any process at College Point,Thurm says, and he's even planning a system of 15 scoreboards all over the plantto convey how fast the presses are running, what the product is and othermanufacturing data.
Imagine tables of workers in the cafeteria rooting for their departments asthe scoreboard reads:
Pressroom: 45
Mailroom: 43
Time left: 4:30.
Sports analogies aside, Thurm thinks the scoreboards are a good way tomonitor processes throughout the plant. "Why shouldn't you be able to lookup in the cafeteria and see how the processes are running?" he asks.
The Times' production will migrate from the old 43rd Street plant to CollegePoint by June, and the next milestone will be a full-color New York Times, withlater deadlines and more sections, probably in September.
"We're on budget and on schedule," Thurm says of the $350 millionproject. "We did a lot of planning. It limits the surprises."
The Seattle Times
Everybody knows to build plants near highways and railroads, but in seasidecommunities, you have to watch the bridges as well.
"We had an extensive search done by The Austin Co.," says FrankPaiva, The Seattle Times' vice president for production. "We would havepreferred one big site, but that wasn't possible, so we're going with multipleplants."
The first is on a 35-acre site in Bothell, Wash., northeast of Seattle.
"We picked that site because it gives us the ability to distributenewspapers without going across bridges--Mercer Island is the only bridge wehave to cross," Paiva says.
The location allows the Times to "cascade newspapers down both sidesof Lake Washington," he adds. And if further expansion is needed, thecompany owns another site south of the city, which will allow it to send trucksnorth.
Editorial stays downtown, along with the old presses, though Paiva saysthere's flexibility to move the newsroom to Bothell if necessary.
When it came time to plan the building, Paiva and his colleagues hit theroad.
"We spent a lot of time looking at different operations across thecountry--Minneapolis, the Chicago Tribune, Fort Worth and Atlanta," Paivasays. "We basically took the best of what we saw in terms of design andlayout for a smooth workflow, and worked with Austin to design the plant to beas efficient as possible."
One of the first things banished from the new design was columns.
"We had a lot of columns downtown, and we did everything we could toget rid of them in the new building."
When it came time to put presses in that column-free building, anotherproblem presented itself: Goss had a great set of blueprints for the Colorlineroffset press, but they hadn't actually built one, Paiva says.
"We took a look at their work and figured they could produce it."
The Times installed three of the presses right away and added a fourth lastyear.
The switchover from downtown to Bothell went well, Paiva says. "Therewere a lot of hours in the pressroom, because we were completing installation oftwo presses as the first one was going on edition."
Paiva seeded experienced offset press workers throughout the operation bytaking the first crew off the first press and moving 60 percent of it to thenext one, leaving the others behind to run the first one. He repeated the sameprocess for each new press.
Glitches?
"We didn't have many," Paiva says. "We did a tremendousamount of training, and that was the key to our successful startup."
"The biggest problem we had was when one of the pasters fell off atruck," he says. "We had to slip it in later in the schedule."
The Toronto Star
When it came time for the Toronto Star to start looking for more space, theproduction executives knew what they didn't want: elevators.
"We had three floors in the old downtown building," says GlennSimmonds, production director. "The pressroom was on one floor and themailroom was on another."
Adds Jagoda Pike, vice president for operations, "We spent a lot oftime moving products up and down. So the idea was to build on one level."
Like everybody, the Star looked at downtown sites first, "but therewasn't enough acreage downtown," says Pike. "If there was space, therewere environmental costs for soil removal and cleanup. Those two factors takentogether moved us out here."
"Here" is the Toronto suburb of Woodbridge--a 26-acre site thatthe Star happened to already own, having built a now-closed rotogravure plant onit years before.
Down came the roto plant and up--not too far up--went thesingle-production-floor Vaughn Press Centre.
"We designed it so there would be a lower grade on one side for thepaper to come in at the same level as the reel rooms," says Simmonds. "Therest of the building--pressroom, mailroom, loading docks--is on the same level."
The result, he says, is that paper travels vertically only from the reelroom to the press. After that, the product flow is optimized for speed.
During the plant construction, some new technologies were installeddowntown, so they could be tested and personnel could be trained.
"We installed a PageFax unit downtown and faxed pages from the fifth tothe third floors," Simmonds says. Similarly, new mailroom equipment got ashakedown at the old plant.
The pressroom, though, was a different matter. The Star had installed sixMAN-Roland Colorman presses, and there was no way the company could movegradually into that changeover.
"We walked into the pressroom cold," Pike says, "We weretrying to run two plants and two products with one staff, and trying tounderstand what the requirements were."
Ah, yes: two products.
As if the rigors of moving from downtown to the 'burbs and installing newpresses weren't enough, The Toronto Star also moved from a 54-inch to a 50-inchweb width and shortened its cutoff from 23-9/16 inches to 22 inches.
That meant the Star couldn't use the new presses for pre-runs while doingthe "hard news" sections on the old, established press. Each plant hadto produce complete newspapers, start to finish.
So, during the one-year phase-in that ended in July 1993, the paper wasproducing both a big letterpress product and a smaller offset product from thesame paste-ups downtown.
The PageFax took care of shrinking the page negatives during thetransmission process, and Greater Toronto got an ever-increasing number ofoffset newspapers as the phase-in progressed.
As one might expect, building a new plant provides a lot of automationpossibilities, and Toronto has installed a ton of them:
The development work hasn't stopped, either. The Star is building a highlysophisticated mailroom-management system that will be tightly interfaced withthe business systems downtown and installing automatic blanket washers on itspresses.
South Bend (Ind.) Tribune
The valedictory for the South Bend Tribune's new-plant experience comes notfrom a present executive, but a former one: Peter Baker, now of The Grand Rapids(Mich.) Press. "We stayed downtown and kept on working together--that's thebig thing," he says. But some architectural firms needed convincing.
"We had two firms working on it," recalls David Ray, the Tribune'svice president for development and planning. "One said we should move outto the Greenfield site, and they would give us their wonderful generic plant.Our owners said, 'No, try again,' and this company said they couldn't do it.
"But The Austin Co. guys sharpened up their pencils again" andfound a way to keep the Tribune downtown, Ray says.
"They designed a downtown plant that gave us all the same elements thata remote plant would by taking away an existing building and parking lot, andexpanding the old plant," adds Baker.
"We had an interest in maintaining a downtown presence, and we didn'twant to introduce the communications problems that you get with a remote site."
The design, a separate press building that's linked to the older facility bya walkway, was partially imported by Baker from a building he saw in Kassel,Germany. He took the design back to South Bend, where he and Ray worked withAustin's architects to adapt it to "our downtown culture," as Bakerputs it.
"South Bend is a conservative community, with a lot of churches andolder architecture downtown. We didn't want the building to look like amanufacturing plant, so we made the look of the brick and even the color of therooftop fit in without sticking out," Baker says.
He adds the plant is particularly striking at night, with dramatic lightingand big glass windows that let you see the presses running from the outside
The new plant was done in stages, Baker says, with a big mailroom renovationand new loading docks put in as the press building was going up.
Bundles are loaded automatically onto trucks through chutes at the dock. Adriver punches in a code corresponding to his route, and the bundles come outthe chute, Baker says.
After the new KBA-Motter keyless anilox presses were installed, changeoverwas easy, Baker adds. "We used the new press for advance runs until it wasshaken down, and we simply switched over to it one Sunday morning."
Foster's Daily Democrat, Dover, N.H.
Like his counterparts at other newspapers, Rick Foster looked at sitesaround the city when expansion time arrived--but when push came to shove, hefound himself pushing outside the central city for more room.
"We looked at trying to do something with the downtown location,"says Foster, vice president of operations for Foster's Daily Democrat, "butwe concluded anything downtown would give us immediate operations problems andno possibility for expansion." The prize site turned out to be anindustrial park at the center of a triangle formed by the cities of Somersworth,Rochester and Dover, which constitute about 70 percent of the Democrat'scirculation.
It was next to the Spalding Turnpike, the main traffic artery in the region.
And it was 40-acres of land that, although surrounded by wetlands, was dry,with very dense soil--"good stuff to build on," as Foster put it. Thatmade the sale.
"There was a point where I said, 'The stars are in alignment on thisthing,'" Foster recalls, and that was that.
The architect designed the new building to conform to the topography of thearea. The outside footings were designed for future expansion--they're extrabig, to support inside walls if an addition is needed.
Architecture aside, the equipment is New Hampshire conservative. The paper's30-year-old Goss Urbanite offset press was replaced with another Goss Urbaniteoffset press (though the Fosters did splurge a little, going from six units andone folder to 14 units and two folders).
When it comes to getting the pages from downtown to the new site, do youthink there's fiber optic, PageFax? Nope, there's a car, which shuttles the pagenegatives between buildings in about 10 minutes.
"We're set up for transmission," Foster says, "but we're notdoing that at this point for expense reasons, and partly just to keep theproject from being more complicated than it already was."
The Times Leader, Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., you'll find the old Times Leader plant and--about 100yards away--the new Times Leader plant, which opened officially at the end ofFebruary.
But the new plant is partially the old distribution plant, which has nothingto do with the old print site. Confused yet?
"We already had a distribution facility," says Albert Manzi, vicepresident of operations. "The mailroom moved there in 1983, when the weeklynewspaper closed its doors. So we've been trucking papers from the old buildingto this building every day, packaging them and sending them to distributioncenters."
When more space was needed, it didn't take much to look around the threeacre facility and say, "Here."
But if site selection was all it took to get a new facility, the newspaperindustry's per-capita antacid consumption would be considerably lower.
Consider the Times Leader: "We had to do a lot of reclamation of thesite--the soil was unsuitable, and we had to remove 18 feet of it, have new fillbrought in, and then put three feet of steel-reinforced concrete on top of that."
Their equipment choices reflect an interesting amalgam of old and new.
"We traveled to Germany and to a number of sites in the United Statesto look at presses, and we decided to spend what we needed to spend," Manzisays.
So the old letterpress has given way to a highly computerized MAN RolandGeoman offset press--but instead of keyless inking, it has an open fountain.
"Keyless wasn't that big a deal," Manzi says. "Our wasteaverages 2.5 percent. Keyless might drop it a little bit, but how much are yougoing to spend for it?"
Similarly, who needs a PageFax when you're only a hundred yards away?
"We hand-carry the negatives from the old building to the new one,"Manzi says. There's no payback yet for electronic transmission, so they'llsimply carry the negatives until direct-to-plate transmission is feasible.
Windsor (Ontario) Star
Kevin McIntosh calls it the "age-old argument: Should the main officeof a newspaper be in the heart of the city or in an industrial park?"
As with some of the other newspapers we looked at, the city won--but notjust with the votes of the newspaper executives.
"There was an immediate and strong reaction from city hall and downtownmerchants" when they heard the Star might move, says McIntosh, director ofmanufacturing for the paper. "They saw 300 people moving out and not comingback."
So the production plant went out to a 13-acre site outside the core city,and the newsroom and other offices stayed where they were.
The decision turned out to be not only popular but also the most practical,says McIntosh. "We were pretty much landlocked downtown," he says. "Welooked at accommodating the new plant downtown, but it proved not to befeasible."
Soon came the architects from Eurographica, which was already doing otherprojects for the Star's owners, Southam Newspapers. McIntosh says the paper alsoinvolved a local firm "for the finishing touches."
But the final design, it turned out, came from McIntosh himself.
"I was drawing on a white board in a basement conference room. I wanteda straight flow of things from one end of the plant to the other. They looked atit, scratched their heads, and said, 'Yeah...'"
And a straight flow is what he got, with a KBA-Motter keyless anilox offsetpress at one end, right through to the mailroom on the other.
Then installation hell began. The original startup date of September 1996came and went.
Soon it was November, the month of big newspapers, a great time to start ashakedown at a new plant. Newspapers were trucked in from downtown to feed thenew inserters.
Then, on Nov. 25, 1996, says McIntosh, "We basically stepped off thecliff, turned off downtown and turned on the new site. It's our version ofbungee-jumping."
But why not switch over more gradually?
McIntosh replies with a question: Why be gradual at all?
"The first couple of weeks were pretty tough," he admits. "Butwe saw what other people had done with their phase-ins, lasting up to a year,and we said, 'If we're going to carve out that kind of challenge for ourselves,why not just do it at the new plant?'"
And they have.
"We're still dealing with bugs and training. It's been a hugetechnological jump for our staff. The mailroom was a huge jump itself,"says McIntosh. "Downtown was totally manual, with hand inserting, but hereit's all computerized.
"This week, for instance," he adds, "I have atechnician/trainer coming in for the inserters. He's down on the floor before,during and after the run, doing fine-tuning with the guys.
"This is not for the faint of heart."
So if and when the time comes to expand your operations and modernize yourfacilities, remember the old adage, "Look before you leap." Do yourhomework, visit other brand-new newspaper sites, create a budget and a schedule,and stick to them like superglue. But also remember the other old (and basicallycontradictory) adage, "He who hesitates is lost." For in the end, nomatter how much you plan, you have to count on doing a little bungee jumping.
John Bryan is a member of the Technology Resource Group at the LosAngeles Times. E-mail, john.bryan@latimes.com;phone, (213) 237-4711.
Sources
Peter Baker, The Grand Rapids Press, 151 N. Michigan St., Grand Rapids,Mich. 49503. Phone, (616) 222-5402; fax, (616) 459-8101.
Rick Foster, Foster's Daily Democrat, 333 Central Ave., Dover, N.H. 03820.E-mail, rfoster@fosters.com; phone,(603) 742-4455; fax, (603) 749-4029.
Albert Manzi, The Times-Leader, 15 N. Main St., Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 18711.E-mail, alm@abc.com; phone, (717) 829-7194;fax, (717) 829-7287.
Kevin McIntosh, Windsor Star, 3000 Starway Ave., Windsor, Ontario, CanadaN8W5P1. E-mail, kmcintosh@win. southam.ca;phone, (519) 945-0035; fax, (519) 945-2669.
Frank Paiva, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, Wash. 98111. E-mail,fpaiva@seatimes.com; phone, (206)464-2910; fax, (206) 464-8460.
Jagoda Pike, Glenn Simmonds and Dean Zavarise, The Toronto Star, 1 CenturyPlace, Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada L4L8R2. E-mail,Jpike@thestar.ca; phone, (905) 850-6525;fax, (905) 850-6528.
David Ray, South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax, South Bend, Ind., 46626.E-mail, dray@sbtinfo.com; phone, (219)236-6328; fax, (219) 236-1765.
David Thurm, The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10035.E-mail, Thurm@nytimes.com; phone, (212)556-1714; fax, (212) 556-5901.