Tear Sheet Tips
Improving color reproduction plays a key role in winning--and keeping--national advertisers. But quality reproduction is only half the battle. The best-reproduced national ad, after all, won't impress anyone if the newspaper sends out tear sheets pulled from the beginning of press runs before registration has been achieved--or worse yet, sheets with folder marks, wrinkles or other mechanical defects.
To address the problem, NAA has developed a generic procedure for generating best-quality tear sheets as part of its Newspaper Color Reproduction Quality Initiative (TechNews, Sept./Oct. 1996, p. 6). The obvious but oft-overlooked goal: obtaining tear sheets from the best part of the press run.
NAA suggests the pressroom supervisor or press-crew representative have the responsibility of informing the mailroom or packaging supervisor when tear-sheet copies are ready to be pulled.
Once a sample is taken, it should be carefully checked for the following criteria:
- Uniform ink laydown and color balance across the page.
- Customer priorities for color reproduction are followed.
- Logos, products and memory colors must match the customer-supplied proof. If a proof is unavailable, gray bars, if used, should be set to density specifications across the sheet. When neither a proof nor gray bar is available, memory colors (green grass and blue skies or water, for example) must match.
- Registration must not exceed 0.012 inch in color in any direction-lateral, circumferential or skewed, as referenced to the black printer-or 0.015 inch in any direction between any two colors.
- Sheets must be free of mechanical marking or other defects, including but not limited to folder marks, setoff, wrinkles, scratches, margins, ink spitting and blank defects.
Once the best-possible samples have been obtained, NAA also suggests guidelines for submission, including:
- Full-color and spot-color advertising pages should be pulled out of sample newspapers so only the single or double-truck page containing the ad is shipped to the customer.
- Unless the customer specifies otherwise, two tear sheets of each full- or spot-color ad should be pulled.
- Each tear-sheet page should be marked with information including the publication name, city and state.
- Tear sheets should be laid flat, ad side up for single pages, or folded once against itself for a double-truck. The entire pile should then be half-folded and placed in a large-enough envelope (approximately 12-by-14 inches) to avoid further folding.
NAA also suggests retaining extra tear sheets with comments from each press line for future use or pickup.