Plastic, Fantastic Paper
by Steve Ostrofsky
You're heading for Denver, dragging your carry-on and wondering who packedthe anvil. You want a newspaper, but the top paper in the stack is trashed, soyou yank out the next one. You sprint down the corridor, trailing loose insertsand sections, get to your seat, and find that half the front page rubbed off onyour sleeve. After arriving in Denver, you see something that makes you wish youhad waited to buy the paper--a stack of individually shrink-wrapped newspapers,neat, complete, clean and easy to carry.
The problem of maintaining product integrity and appearance in single-copysales is common, whether the point of sale is an airport, supermarket or streethawker. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News has begun a development project withSitma U.S.A. Inc. of St. Paul, Minn., to address these issues by shrink-wrappingsome of its single-copy papers.
According to Paul Gledhill, the Rocky's vice president of operations, Sitmahas installed a developmental version of a four-into-one, integrated,collating-and-wrapping machine in the News' mailroom, where it has beenshrink-wrapping approximately 3,800-to-4,000 copies of the Sunday package sinceMarch. Shrink-wrapping of selected daily packages began in April. Although thesystem has experienced some birth pains, Gledhill reports that he's highlyoptimistic.
The prototype system at the News consists of four manually operated feederheads, two on each side of a conveyor belt, using cam-driven nips to feed thesections. As the sections are fed and collated, the belt passes the sections toa shrink-wrapper that seals the package. Sitma's president, Pete Butikis, saysthe system is now producing about 4,000-to-5,000 copies per hour and isprojected to run at twice that speed when autoloaders (currently underdevelopment) are installed. When fully operational, the system will have theability to insert top or bottom sheets and print an ink-jet label on eachpackage.
While Sitma has shrink-wrapping equipment at other newspaper sites, Butikisbelieves the News is the only paper currently producing complete products aspart of its regular cycle. He reports that four more systems are on order, oneof which will be exhibited at NEXPO in New Orleans.
Although the News' experiment in shrink-wrapping has just begun, BruceJohnson, vice president of circulation, believes it's already successful. Hereports that Sunday sales at Denver International Airport have soared, and dailysales are up sharply. The shrink-wrapped papers are also being tested atsupermarkets, where the visual appeal and package integrity have been wellreceived by store managers. In addition, the Rocky has started to experimentwith shrink wrapping some of its street-hawker copies. Denver's unpredictableweather should prove a good test of the concept.
Steve Ostrofsky is president of Publishing Productivity Systems Inc.,Bremerton, Wash. E-mail, stevevelo@silverlink.net;phone, (360) 308-0121.