North Wales Newspapers (Newspaper Publisher)

North Wales Newspapers
Raymond Tunley, NWN's Group Technical Manager



The Evolution of a Newspaper

Starting a business is never an easy task. Successfully convincing a market that yours is the best solution takes a tremendous amount of hard work, perseverance and patience. Once a business is successful, and has found its audience, it is just as difficult to hold on to it. A company must continue to please its customers, evolve with their tastes and desires, and still seek new audiences to grow the core business. To do that takes another fantastic mix of more hard work, more perseverance and more patience. It also helps to invest in the right technology.

Looking to the Next 150 Years of Newspaper Publishing

For more than 150 years, North Wales Newspapers (NWN), based in the UK, has been doing just that. NWN produces 12 different publications (one daily and 11 weeklies) with a combined circulation of more than 400,000 per week. From the very start, NWN has been a family-owned business, bringing news to the North Wales region.

If you stop to think about it, the concept of newspapers really hasn't changed much over the past 150 years. Newspapers are a mix of different categories of information, delivered to customers in a convenient, easy-to-read package.

What's changed most significantly about newspaper publishing is the equipment used in the production process. Today's reporters use tape recorders, laptop computers or even personal digital assistants to capture their notes. Images from around the globe are more likely to come from the Internet instead of a darkroom.

Behind the scenes, too, the equipment has changed. To keep up with these changes, in an effort to provide nearly 750,000 readers the best newspapers they can get their hands on, NWN also makes sure its production equipment is the best it can be.

The Workflow Runs the Show

One major change NWN made to its production system was to overhaul its workflow. Raymond Tunley, NWN's Group Technical Manager, was looking for new workflow software that would be able to accommodate his two :3850 CtF imagesetters, but also give him the flexibility to make the switch to CtP platesetting at some point in the future. Agfa's :Arkitex workflow, which was launched at IFRA in 2003, provided Raymond with the flexibility and functionality that he was looking for.

"We are pleased with the :Arkitex software and how it has been implemented without disruption to our current system," Tunley said. "Not only has performance increased but it has also simplified and unified our workflow. I can't stress enough how much we have benefited from the SoftProofing. As we work with negative film, the ability to have SoftProofs and view them as composites at an early stage in the production cycle is critical to our business. It has already saved us time and consumables, as normally we wouldn't see these errors until produced by the plate."

As a happy :3850 CtF customer, Tunley didn't feel compelled to look very far when it came time to look for a new workflow system.

"Our reason for choosing :Arkitex was the fact that Agfa brought the Autologic and Agfa businesses together to provide one solution - it gives us the best of both worlds," Tunley said. "We did research this investment very carefully and especially examined all the solutions Agfa had to offer. Agfa willingly accommodated our analysis and we spent a great deal of time looking at the :Arkitex software to ensure it satisfied our requirements."

Already :Arkitex has made life easier not only for NWN, but for its readers, advertisers, and for the contract print customers whose newspapers NWN also produces.

"In the past, we never had problems with unplanned pages because we always provided our customers with plate templates ensuring their jobs were positioned correctly and easily identified - a good procedure but more work for the customer. However, now we just ask them to provide single-page PDFs. This makes the customer's lives easier and makes our file archiving simpler, as we are handling single pages and not sheets," Tunley said.

Ten years, 20 years, 50 years - all are very impressive milestones. 150 years - they must be doing everything right.

About :Arkitex

:Arkitex is the most complete fourth-generation workflow solution available for newspapers. Newspapers in more than 22 countries all around the world, including New Zealand, The United States, Germany and Brazil have begun using the system.

:Arkitex is an open-architecture workflow system for newspapers that tracks and manages processes from the front-end all the way to the pressroom. It provides automatic feedback on the status and actions required and allows users to track details, obtain proofs and receive approvals from authorised users before making film, plates or transmitting data to print sites.