TechNews Visits the Sun-Sentinel
by Pete Wetmore
Miami Beach is warm, its streets congested.
I'm sitting on a slowly moving bus, the ride courtesy of the Newspaper Association of America. NAA arranged a tour of the Sun-Sentinel, up the coast in Fort Lauderdale, for its 1998 Newspaper Operations SuperConference attendees. An hour later we reach downtown Fort Lauderdale, the Sun-Sentinel logo visible on one pillar of a tall building.
The Sun-Sentinel occupies nearly four floors of this downtown office building, owned by parent Tribune Co. until last year. |
As we step off the bus, a photographer snaps our picture (we learn why shortly). We're escorted into the first-floor atrium. I introduce myself to Rich Pollack, a one-time assistant city editor who is now the Sun-Sentinel's communications manager.
Split into color-coded groups, those of us with green tickets pack the adjacent auditorium. Earl Maucker, the paper's editor and a former printer, tells us how the Sun-Sentinel has blossomed from a 70,000-circulation local daily in the early '80s, when it shared the market with the Fort Lauderdale News.
"The growth of this market and this newspaper have been remarkable," Maucker says. Sunday circulation has nearly doubled since 1980, to 420,000; the news staff totals 360.
The newsroom is 18 miles from the printing facility in Deerfield Beach, which opened in 1989. In the early days, Maucker says, the paper used "Honda faxing" to get press-bound material to the plant. Now, the Sun-Sentinel produces close to 2,000 pages a week on its CCI Europe NewsDesk pagination system, which went live in July 1996. Maucker says the project will be completed in 1999, when 330 Dell PCs are live on the CCI editorial front-end.
Maucker bids us farewell. Our escort, John Chiu, a training-towards-management associate, explains that the paper occupies floors 9, 10, 11 and part of 12. (I learn later that government agencies, television operations and medical offices occupy the other 16 floors of a building Tribune Co. owned until 1997.) We ride an elevator up to 11, where we take seats in front of a diagram of the Sun-Sentinel's production scheme.
With doomed Atex terminals glowing behind him, senior copy editor Nick Sortal demonstrates layout on a CCI Europe workstation. |
Five facilities feed display ads, editorial copy and classifieds to Deerfield Beach, Pre-press Operations Manager Colleen Lang tells us. A 100 megabit-per-second Ethernet network links the CCI system, display-ad makeup stations and Scitex Ltd. color workstations to five Autologic Information International 3850 imagesetters. Classified ads--26 pages weekdays, 60 on Sundays--are dumped from a legacy Atex front-end through an Autologic APS 100 imager, with display ads pasted on page boards.
Although the Sun-Sentinel runs dozens of color pages a week, proofing is inexact, Lang says. The paper doesn't use the same raster-image processor to output both proofs and page negatives, which has led to some problems reconciling screen and print versions of ads. Last-in/first-out page flow to the 3850s is split into color and monochrome.
During south Florida's peak tourism season, the Sun-Sentinel gets about 4,000 ads each week, 10 percent of them via digital delivery. Because digital delivery is expanding, the need to purchase a Tecsa scanner to supplement an existing Eskofot is waning, Lang says.
The green group heads back to the auditorium for a CCI pagination demo. System Editor Jerry Lower shows how an editor uses a shapes library to launch pages. He goes to a photo directory, clicks on an image of our arrival and drags it onto a page. Each afternoon, Lower says, the production editor decides page order. Designers assemble pages on 22 workstations; one person may do 20 pages a night.
The ninth floor is next, where Executive News Editor Kurt Franck walks us through the newsroom. A large area in muted teal, it boasts many windows, a low ceiling and doomed Atex terminals, their green characters casting glows on many a desk. Copy is written and edited on Atex, and H&Jed on CCI.
A phone rings; page deadlines are confirmed. Each completed news page is proofed to 11x17 paper and compared with the screen image, Franck explains, then sent either to advertising for completion or to a 3850.
Our day at the Sun-Sentinel ends with a glance into the darkroom-turned-training room, where CCI users attended three-week sessions. Franck says only about one photo in four is shot on film.
We descend to the first floor and get on the bus. The ride back is blessedly shorter than the ride out.
Deerfield Beach
Three days later, I arrive at the Sun-Sentinel's printing plant in Deerfield Beach-a beige, two-story expanse of glass, surrounded by palm trees, picnic tables and parking lots. Traffic rolls by on I-95.
The Deerfield Beach printing plant is 18 miles from downtown. |
My guide, Rich Pollack, jokes that the building is "the only newspaper plant built around tours." It houses circulation, operations, human resources, technology, consumer marketing and classified, as well as one of the five advertising groups created in a notable grass-roots effort (TechNews, March/April 1997).
Pollack guides me down a long corridor; along one wall is a wavy rainbow in cyan, yellow and magenta. Pollack explains that CMYK has special meaning at the Sun-Sentinel-work groups are named Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.
Students gave nicknames to each of the plant's automatic-guided vehicles. |
We enter the reel room, where we watch yellow strobes flashing atop rubber-wheeled automated guided vehicles made by FMC Corp. Computerized instructions set several moving at once, like dancers on a broad stage.
Pollack explains that the building is nine years old. "Some things are starting to wear out," he says. "We're fixing what we got."
The reel room adjoins the newsprint warehouse. We ascend on stairs with bright yellow railings to a green balcony overlooking pillars of newsprint, five reels to a column, delivered by rail and truck. The balcony area is equipped for tours, providing paper and crayons for kids to draw and write to Sunny Sun-Sentinel, the paper's recycling mascot.
Visiting students note the plant's CMYK rainbow, identifying different operational work groups. |
We walk into a corridor that starts near the balcony; on one wall is a 50-foot-long photograph of the press line. We meet Bob Christie, the pre-press and process coordination manager. He says there are 45 units in the five Goss Colorliners installed in 1989 and augmented in 1996. In 1996, three levels were added to each of the five presses, with six printing couples added to the existing mono unit on each press. The expansion doubled capacity, from eight run-of-paper four-color pages to 16.
Bringing in the new units involved reinforcing the pressroom floor ("that was the big trick," Pollack says), laying down rail tracks to carry the units inside the building, and opening one wall to allow each unit to be hoisted up and onto a rail car.
"There's newer technology out there now," Christie says, "but I don't think there's any that reproduces color better."
I'm told the pressroom is spanking clean; Christie explains that filth was left behind with the old letterpresses. Now everyone picks up paper scraps immediately, and Pollack says he's witnessed people scrubbing ink grime from the pressroom walls. (Later, Susan Hunt, who joined the paper as operations director last fall, tells me, "I always thought they spruced up when they had visitors, but no, they do it all the time." Hunt also described teamwork among departments-news, technology, advertising and production-as "very tightly woven," more so than she had expected.)
Pollack and I enter the pressroom, its shiny black floor reflecting light from windows scores of feet away. Huge black tubes carry fresh air near the towering blue Goss units, some of which have stainless-steel doors over the rollers.
We remark on the magic of a turning press. These presses run virtually nonstop, from 6 p.m. Sunday to 8 a.m. the following Sunday. The workload includes eight zoned community tabs, four editions of the Sun-Sentinel, the national edition of The New York Times, the weekend magazine Showtime, the alternative magazine City Link and a targeted publication called Shalom.
We exit. Heading down one hallway, we encounter Alan Abramson, the pressroom-operations manager and co-chairman of an unusual and highly effective task force on web breaks. Back in August 1996, Abramson recalls, the pressroom hit "rock bottom." Webs were breaking as often as once every 18 rolls. The answer: a team, comprising a press supervisor, maintenance worker, machinist and electrician.
Additional color capacity was added to the plant's five 45-unit Goss Colorliners in 1996. |
"At first," Abramson explains, "we were fighting fires all over the place," as webs snapped at a rate of 50 to 70 a week. Everyone was made aware of the problem; strict adherence to procedures was mandated. After one month, breaks fell from one per 18 rolls to one per 30.
More needed to be done. A high-speed video camera recorded the moving web, and the team soon discovered a correlation between web breaks and wrinkles introduced at the paster. The belt area was tightened, Abramson says, to three inches; paster patterns were tweaked until "there were no wrinkles." In a further refinement, "bridge" tape was added in place of double pasting. When the joint hits the press, the tape bonds without wrinkles.
In 1997, the team reported an average of 49 rolls between breaks.
Our next stop is circulation. En route we pass under a silver-lettered declaration, PRIDE-People Responsible in Developing Excellence. Circulation sports a signboard flashing the number of seconds the customer longest on hold has been waiting--32. Pollack explains how the Sun-Sentinel pioneered delivery of products besides its own, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
I ask if we'll be visiting the mail room next. "Packaging department," Pollack replies. On the other side of yet another wall of windows are four blue lines of GMA SLS-1000 inserters. Ferag conveyors 30 feet above the floor carry papers across the room and down in serpentine stretches to drop them in stackers. A red machine bearing the sign T-Wrapper spins a pallet of bundles, wrapping it in cellophane.
My visit winds down with a stroll through the classified-advertising phone area. A yellow sign dangles from the ceiling, black letters declaring: "Shh! We're on the phone with our boss (our customer)."
My tour ends; we leave the building. As I head for my car, Pollack bustles off, exhibiting the enthusiasm that pervades the Sun-Sentinel, where only the spirit is more cutting-edge than the technology.
Pete Wetmore is a free-lance editor and writer based in Urbana, Ill. E-mail, pw@colegroup.com; phone, (217) 367-6521; fax, (217) 367-5047. All photos by Mark Thomas, who works in the Sun-Sentinel communications department.