Journal Register Offset (Exton, Pennsylvania, USA)

Quality and time-saving processes help the award-winning Journal Register Offset succeed

Based in Exton, Pennsylvania, Journal Register Offset (JRO) is the largest printing arm of the Journal Register Company, headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania, and in addition to five dailies JRO also prints 59 weekly newspapers and approximately 40 special sections each month. The newspapers in the JRC family range in circulation from a few thousand at some of its weeklies, to the New Haven Register, the second largest daily newspaper in Connecticut, with a circulation of approximately 95,000 on Sunday.

Recognition

"Our continued success comes directly from hard work and the great team we have established here at JRO. Combine that with great equipment and a great selection of consumables and you get an award-winning facility," said general manager Gary Coppola, who is responsible for running the day-to-day operations at the plant, which has approximately 100 Employees. Coppola is referring to the many awards JRO has received over the years for the quality of their prepress and printing activities. Journal Register Offset was recently accepted into the 2006-2008 International Newspaper Color Quality Club, the printing quality competition run by Ifra (an international association for newspaper and media publishing), the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) and PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association). This is the highest honor a newspaper can receive for its printing quality. There are only 50 members accepted every two years from all around the world, and this year's competition, included only 7 winners from the United States.

In 2006, JRO also won four awards, including two first-place honors in the tenth annual. "Print Quality Contest" at the America East Newspaper Operations and Technology Conference held in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Furthermore, two JRO newspapers in Pennsylvania, The Landsdale Reporter and The Wayne Suburban, won the "Best in Show" awards in 2006 and 2005, respectively.

Part of the reason Coppola and his team are able to keep such a firm grip on quality, even in the often uncompromising world of newspaper printing, is because their procedures have proven to be enormously effective. First, JRO receives completed TIF files directly from the newspapers, which show JRO exactly what the papers should look like from cover to cover - from layouts and pagination to colors and all special considerations in between. While each newspaper has control over editorial content, JRO takes responsibility for outputting all plates and proofs, based on those files, determining where problems or issues might have to be addressed, and then printing the final product. Coppola and his team require that the workflow products and consumables used at JRO be as reliable as possible - and that, too, is directly related to the group's ongoing successes.

"When you print several dailies and dozens of weeklies, the last thing you need is to have a problem with plates and proofs," he said. "With Agfa as one of our most important product suppliers, we know we're being kept up-to-date with today's best and latest technologies."

Collaboration

At times, JRO may run as many as 50 special newspaper sections in a single month. "The biggest challenge is to get the special section pages from the newspaper on time to meet our extremely busy production schedules," explained Coppola. "We do this by getting a list - a monthly planner - of all sections from all locations two weeks before the end of each month, for printing in the month that follows. This way we can set up a good schedule before the month starts and have plenty of time to make any changes if there are any conflicts."

Time, however, is not always in large supply at a company as busy as JRO and its parent, the Journal Register Company. The management team at JRO goes to great lengths to make sure that the production staff has what they need to do the job, whether it requires new or different technology, additional training, or modified procedures. The key is getting the job done - on time, error-free, and with the quality that wins awards.

Toward that end, Agfa Graphics' products are a big part of the workflow at many of the Journal Register's individual Philadelphia cluster newspaper sites. Twenty of the sites now utilize Agfa's :IntelliTune software to analyze and correct the tone, color and spatial characteristics of the newspapers' photographic and graphic art images.

"The choice for image software was an easy one for JRO," Coppola said. "IntelliTune has a very good track record. Many of the top newspapers in the U.S. are using it successfully, and it was easy for us to contact many of them directly." Coppola and several JRO colleagues went so far as to visit another local newspaper to test the product first-hand prior to the final purchase decision. :IntelliTune has been so successful at JRO that the group continues to roll it out to additional newspapers within the company.

"We had two goals in mind when we purchased the software," Coppola added. "First, we wanted consistency throughout our newspapers, and secondly, we needed to save our operators as much time as possible."

Because JRO is a consolidated printing facility, it was easy to print the same images in several dailies on the same day. With different operators doing the toning remotely, the results in each daily were often noticeably different. :IntelliTune eliminated those variables. :IntelliTune also became a big time saver for JRO. The time it saved from manual color correction duties gave operators more time to work on other quality issues. That was an opportunity JRO did not want to pass up.

"After just three months of regular use we did an in-house survey of all :IntelliTune operators, and everyone agreed that the software was something they could not do without," reported Coppola. "In addition to the quality enhancements, we have increased efficiency across the 20 locations saving many hours per week."

Good Intuition

Coppola's staff also uses :Arkitex workflow, which has proven at many newspaper production facilities around the world to be both reliable and intuitive, with a user-friendly interface that operators appreciate. The staff at JRO appreciates how easy it was to train on :Arkitex, and how simple it was to deploy across the entire production facility.

Coppola's group also uses Agfa's :N91 plates. These negative-working aluminum plates are specially designed for long-run newspaper production. "The plates are consistent shipment to shipment," said Coppola, "and provide us with the highest quality for our readers and advertisers. With approximately 120 press runs a week, it's the kind of stability and reliability we need." Coppola added that people do not realize that the recognition they are getting at JRO is based on small circulation dailies and weeklies. That's one more reason why they are so very proud of the Times Herald being accepted into the 2006-2008 International Newspaper Color Quality Club, as it has a circulation of approximately 16,000. The JRO daily that won "Best of Show" at America East in 2006 has a 17,000 circulation, and the weekly that won in 2005 has a 7,300 circulation. "The fact is that these accomplishments are extremely hard to achieve when you have to compete against newspapers that print upwards of 100,000 copies a day," Coppola said.

But JRO does earn these accomplishments because the company picks the right teams and the right partners to get the job done. As they prove virtually around the clock, the teams have the commitment and the skills to do the job right the first time and every time, no matter how outrageously busy they get day after day.