The Chicago Tribune's Freedom Center: Building Up, Not Out
by Pete Wetmore
From the outside, Freedom Center, the Chicago Tribune's production plant, resembles many a newspaper facility.
It's a façade.
The nearly windowless, red-brick behemoth is flanked by railroad tracks, the north branch of the Chicago River, Chicago Avenue and a parking lot full of red, white and blue delivery trucks. The Sears Tower, the tallest of Chicago's landmarks, can be seen over the block-long building's left shoulder as visitors enter the five-story atrium lobby on the north side.
Once inside, the design differences inherent in Freedom Center still are not apparent. It's definitely a newspaper plant. The lobby is lined with historic, bigger-than-life front pages, their headlines chronicling world history as told from—and about—Chicago, from the great fire of 1871 to the assassination of President Kennedy.
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| The $187 million, 17-year-old facility has a large sun room for employees on its south side. Visitors enter through a five-story atrium lobby on the north side. |
But when Pre-press Director Rebecca Brubaker launches her tour of the 17-year-old, $187 million facility, she sets the scene for an upside-down experience. The Tribune "built up, not out" in the early '80s, she explains. While some newspaper plants sprawl luxuriously across large campuses, construction of Freedom Center (so named because it is "dedicated to the freedom of the press") was constrained to a 21-acre site just west of Chicago's famed Near North Side entertainment district.
So instead of a linear design, with presses at one end and truck-loading docks at the other, production activities in Freedom Center wend their way down and up, then down again. Consider the ad stacks for any page with editorial type: They travel down from the fourth-floor imaging room to the third-floor composing room, then down to the second-floor plate room and its adjacent pressroom, then up to the fifth-floor packaging area, and finally down to the ground-floor loading docks.
With Sunday circulation exceeding one million and weekday sales ranging from 603,000 early in the week to 673,000 later on, Freedom Center is geared for massive production. More than 14,000 products are printed each year, with four million pounds of black ink coursing through as many as 10 Goss Metroliner/Metrocolor presses at once. About 1,500 people work around the clock to produce eight editions a day.
Brubaker guides her visitor to the third floor, where the daily afternoon edition is being put to bed. The Tribune is essentially a morning paper, but late each weekday afternoon it prints about 26,500 copies of a four- to six-page late edition featuring stock tables from Tribune Media Services, a sister enterprise under the Tribune Co. umbrella. The quick run ends in time for distribution to city-only newsstands and racks, where the pages are wrapped around the morning edition, providing evening commuters with late-breaking news while reducing the number of returned copies.
The composing room is quiet while an operator uses one of five Hell Pressfax machines to send a stocks page downstairs to the plateroom. The same equipment is used nightly to send pages to remote printing plants in Champaign, Ill., and Madison, Wis., where Tribune-supplied 3850 imagesetters from Autologic Information International Inc. of Thousand Oaks, Calif., make negatives for 30,000-copy press runs at each site.
Fax deliveries will be phased out beginning next year, when pagination eliminates conventional blade-and-wax page makeup. Brubaker notes the pending transition as she walks past a cake set out in honor of a departing employee, one of many being redeployed. "With so many people's jobs being impacted, we're trying to celebrate their departures," she says.
Until installation of the new editorial and pagination system from CCI Europe of Denmark is completed in September 2000, news type will continue to spout in galley form from three APS-5 imagesetters fed by the newsroom system from CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich.
A staff of makeup editors occupies a room just off the composing-room floor, closing pages laid out in the newsroom at "the Tower," as Brubaker calls Tribune Tower, a 21-block drive east, then south, from Freedom Center, at the end of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. The two sites are linked by T-1 lines and a shuttle that runs every 30 minutes around the clock.
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| A tray conveyor carries bundles of papers down from the fifth-floor packaging area, above, to the loading dock. |
Production work flow is "still very much paper-based," Brubaker says. Page editors use a CText typesetting log, printed ad stacks generated by Layout/8000 and handwritten notes detailing production status. But they also now rely on computer screens, including a Macintosh used to display Page One, one of several section fronts now partially paginated.
The Tribune's computer systems are housed at Freedom Center, in a war room where classified, editorial and display ads are monitored on several systems (wire feeds are gathered in an adjacent area). This production nerve center directs traffic to a range of imagesetters, including the three APS-5s for editorial, six Agfa units for ads and two AII 3850s for full-page output.
Ad production has led editorial into the digital realm, Brubaker notes. All display ads are handled by the imaging-systems department, either as electronic files from advertisers and their agencies, or as reflective copy scanned on machines made by DS America, Wright Technology or Eskofot. Ads are flowed into pages by the CCI Europe AdChamp system; full-page ads go directly to film, while pages awaiting editorial type go to paper.
Classified ads take two paths to their pages. Liners are output from a System Integrators Inc. classified-pagination system to full-page paper, while display ads are output separately and pasted up. Pagination and an upgrade of the SII system will allow all classified ads to "plop into pages automatically," Brubaker says. Classified ad-entry ends at 5 p.m. Currently, pages assembled in the evening are printed the next morning and distributed the morning after that.
About 18 months ago, the Tribune implemented a quality-control desk, where negatives and proofs are examined to ensure "optimum newspaper reproduction" to meet advertisers' expectations, Brubaker says. Color is the key issue, and while the Tribune was a Scitex site for a long time, it now relies on machines from Wright and Apple Computer. Color proofs are made on newsprint—"we use butt ends of a dinky roll"—through HP DesignJet proofers. Additional proofers are located in
several ad offices scattered throughout Chicagoland.
Around the corner from the color area is a large bay housing the Tribune's remaining page camera, once used extensively to shoot multiple versions of ads for zoned editions. "In pagination, we'll get rid of the camera altogether," Brubaker says.
We head down to the plateroom, which is laid out in assembly-line fashion. Off to one side are two Scitex Dolev imagesetters used exclusively by The New York Times, which contracts with the Tribune to print about 60,000 copies daily. The Tribune's pages are produced through three AII 3850s; negatives cross a light table for examination and then are passed to one of five waiting platemaking lines.
The platemakers are LithXPozer IIIs (there's one model VII), manufactured by Western Lithotech of St. Louis. Plates flow in a steady stream from exposure to benders, where optical punches handle the exacting task of punching and bending 1.2 million plates a year. At the far end of the platemakers stands a line of blackboards—low-tech but highly efficient tools for designating where zoned edition plates go en route to the pressroom next door.
The final afternoon stock-market wrapper is running on one press as we enter the pressroom, which, while not exactly quiet, is notable for its lack of penetrating noise—slits in the concrete walls serve to absorb some of the sound. Brubaker heads into the quiet room, where she points to the belt conveyor carrying papers from the second floor to the fifth.
Off to one side is a specially de-signed computer workstation—a "visualizer," Brubaker calls it—providing a digital display of color pages for pressmen to use in calibrating print color. When pagination makes all pages digital, "this is how you should be matching your color," she says.
We descend to the reel room, whose low ceiling accentuates the ceaseless motion of spinning reels and tracked trucks carrying reels to their destinations. Through a door, we enter what Brubaker calls her "most favorite room," the newsprint storage area.
Nine rail cars sit to one side; their contents are toted to a conveyor leading to the warehouse, where rolls are stacked nine high. They're put in place by one of two hoists with suction grippers that lift eight rolls at a time. Ninety railroad cars are unloaded each week.
From the newsprint area, we pass by the 32 loading docks and step under what looks like a bright yellow carnival ride. It's the tray conveyor that carries bundles of papers from the fifth floor down to the loading dock; each of the two lines of 750 carts is computer-operated.
"Each tray knows where it's going to be dropping product," Brubaker says above the clatter.
An elevator takes us to the mezzanine overlooking the fifth-floor packaging area. Scores of electrical conduits and other lines hang from the ceiling, feeding power to seven Harris inserters and 15 Quipp 350 stackers.
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| The Tribune can zone preprinted material about 300 ways, indicating the extensive capabilities within Freedom Center. |
Despite its evident capacity, the demands of the Sunday Tribune max out Freedom Center's packaging area. A facility called Tribune Packaging West—TPW for short—provides the additional capacity needed to meet demand.
Whether TPW has its own Freedom Center-style upside-down story to tell, we can't say. We may have to visit to find out.
Pete Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pwetmore@earthlink.com; phone, (217) 367-6521.