Las Vegas Adds Color;
Revenue Forecast Is Hot, Hot, Hot
by Pete Wetmore
En route to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a sign flashes the 5 p.m. temperature: 108 degrees. This is a city of extremes—high heat, swift growth, big stakes.
The Review-Journal is racing to do business the Las Vegas way. The flagship of Donrey Media Group of Little Rock, Ark., is expanding to provide advertisers and readers access to almost unending pages of four-color reproduction.
The paper’s $70 million press project has attracted about 40 of us at the end of NEXPO’s third day. The stroll from bus to lobby takes us past a pleasant courtyard, adorned with a fountain and palm trees. In one corner of the lobby stands a newspapering relic, a Linotype Comet 300.
Coming to greet us are Operations Director Terry Duck and Production Manager Richard Borghi. Assisting are Eryn Rice, from the community-relations office, and Gina Rodriquez, a tour guide.
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| Operations Director Terry Duck (left), who oversees production of JOA partners Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun, leads the plant tour. |
Duck leads one of two groups down a wood-paneled hall, past the publisher’s and business offices. The 158,541-circulation Review-Journal is the business agent for the Las Vegas Sun under a joint operating agreement with the 37,591-circulation evening daily. The Review-Journal manages business affairs, production and distribution for both papers.
We enter a longer, utilitarian hallway of painted cinder-block walls on our way to classified advertising. The call center, where about 65 people take ad orders, is on a raised floor at one end of the classified room. Classified, Duck explains, fills about 35 percent of the Review-Journal, making it “one of our major revenue sources.”
Another revenue source is a group of niche periodicals. Rather than editorially zoning the main paper, the Review-Journal publishes a series of tabs named “View,” such as Henderson View for the community of Henderson, Nev. Four of the eight Views are distributed twice a week; the others are weeklies, as is a Spanish-language tab.
The tabs “actually added revenues rather than swapping revenues,” Duck says. They also “keep our presses running with our products—we don’t do job work.”
We move on to the advertising office, where about three dozen people work on an advertising system from Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah. Despite the late hour, an account rep works the phone: “So you’re looking at more like a quarter page...”
Ad tickets are entered into a Collier-Jackson system (now part of Geac Publishing Systems of Tampa, Fla.), and a duplicate is channeled automatically to the DT system. The C-J front-end generates ad stacks and passes them to DT. “In layout these two pieces come back together,” Duck says. Some ads still come in as film, so pagination falls just short of 100 percent.
We leave the digital-ad alley and enter a room dominated by two Lith-X-Pozer platemakers from Western Lithotech of St. Louis. Installed in 1994, they now produce about 500 plates a day (a third machine is coming). Nearby is the imaging department, which handles final editing of all artwork, be it advertising or news.
Our group moves on, through the cramped Review-Journal newsroom; the View and Web staffs work elsewhere. So does the Las Vegas Sun, located several miles away and tied to this facility by fiber-optic cable. “We sell their ads, we print their product, we distribute their product,” Duck says. “What they say is theirs.”
We continue on to an exit, then take a short, hot walk across a parking area to the new building. We step inside a cavernous area; Duck stops to warn us that we’ve entered a construction site where there are “still plenty of places you can trip.”
To our left are four rail cars on a spur that can hold six. They bring newsprint, Duck explains—100 tons a day from five suppliers. The unloading area, adjacent to the newsprint-stroage area, is climate-controlled. “You know how hot it is in Vegas,” Duck says, “and our forklift drivers know, too. We tried to make their environment better.”
We walk past the rail cars and through a low doorway into the new pressroom, a 63-foot-tall hall filled with massive blue Newsliner units from Goss Graphic Systems Inc. of Westmont, Ill. Fifteen months after ground was broken, eight towers encompassing 64 printing couples loom over 12 newsprint reelstands, comprising one of two presses. Each press can run 192 pages collect or 96 straight. An average 64-page Review-Journal press run will be able to carry process color on every page; a 96-page paper could carry full color on 32 pages and spot color on the other 64.
On average days, when the Review-Journal prints 48-to-64 pages in two runs, this color capacity will prove crucial. “We’re turning away color now,” Duck says, disappointing advertisers and forgoing revenue. With such heavy demand for color, he jokes, “One of these days we’ll be charging people extra for running black-and-white ads.”
After descending two steps to examine the press footings, we climb a stairway of glistening blue treads and yellow railings up to a deck halfway to the ceiling. Noting that this is Goss’ first keyless and shaftless doublewide installation in the United States, Duck conducts a seminar in press technology.
A shaftless press has one electric motor for each cylinder, a major design advance from presses of the recent past. Those conventional presses use one or more motors to drive a huge shaft, which turns a series of gears and other shafts to rotate cylinders and print the paper. The older design suffers from gear lag, which wastes newsprint on start-up as color registration is wiggled into place. No more: The smooth, synchronized start of a shaftless press virtually guarantees that even the first copies will be in register.
Duck explains that some papers buy shaftless presses because one or more units can be turned off independently to change plates—for zoned editions, for example—while others remain running. “We bought it for saving newsprint,” not zoning; the Review-Journal moved to a single edition and all straight runs in 1996. Classified pages are printed at 7:30 p.m.; the last news page closes at 12:30 a.m.
As we move around to the back of the press deck, the end unit towers over us like the bow of an aircraft carrier. Along the back, more than 60 black motors protrude about three feet from the blue frame. When they start turning out papers in October, the press crew will aim for net production of 50,000 impressions per hour.
Installation of the second press will be completed in December. The project is on time and under budget—$40 million for the building, $20 million for the presses and $10 million for the packaging facility, where we head next. Duck chuckles as he leads us to an unusual sight—five huge ink tanks, two to our left and three to our right.
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| How serious are the Las Vegas papers about color? Each of these color-coded ink tanks holds 2,700 gallons of cyan, magenta or yellow ink. |
Bearing the logo of US Ink of Carlstadt, N.J., both tanks on the left hold 8,700 gallons of black ink. The color-coded, 2,700-gallon tanks on the right hold cyan, magenta and yellow. Tony Miller, systems manager of the Burlington (Iowa) Hawk Eye, sizes up the three-story-tall containers and comments: “We buy our color ink in five-pound pails.”
We continue downstairs, heading for the packaging department. Overhead conveyors lead to six Quipp ACL cart loaders. This facility was designed with one goal in mind, Duck says: carrier-level zoning, in which bundles of 200-to-300 papers could hold different combinations of inserts for distribution to different circulation areas. A computer system from Heidelberg Web Systems of Dover, N.H., will set bundle sizes. As they are counted, papers will be fed into carts, which when full will be rolled onto leased Ryder trucks and driven to distribution points around Las Vegas.
Our tour is winding down. We head across a parking lot adjacent to an expressway to enter the old building for a glimpse of the existing mail room—the papers’ Achilles heel. That’s Duck’s name for bottlenecks caused when the Goss Metro offset presses shoot 70,000 copies an hour to inserters that can handle at most 50,000.
“We can overrun this area pretty quick,” Duck says, as it struggles to handle as many as 56 million inserts per month. “You can see what we’re trying to accomplish in the new building.” He adds that sometimes the company has only a nine-day supply of newsprint on hand. “It’s a juggling game.”
We pass by the existing presses, whose small color-ink tanks have to be switched out in less than a week. The paper makes do with four color leads maximum; 64-page straight runs have 16 pages of process color and 12 of spot color. Even so, Duck says, “We’re probably running more color here than any paper in the country.”
As the two tour groups are reunited in the lobby, Duck talks of the remaining two phases of the project—renovation of the old pressroom and packaging area into offices, then installation of a third press several years from now. For now, computer-to-plate is not in the picture. With all those color plates, “CTP is costly for us,” Duck says.
At the moment, computer-to-plate is less important than another CTP—color-to-page. When the Review-Journal brings that kind of CTP online soon, it promises to do so in step with all the extremes found in Las Vegas—extremely well.
Pete Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pwetmore@earthlink.com. Photos by Jim K. Decker, Las Vegas Review-Journal.