The News Centre at Portsmouth is approaching the final phase in the installation of its new Man Roland Colourman XXL printing press.
Major work began on the site in July 2005 with the decommissioning of the old heat set press and the demolition of the old press hall and reel store.
Warings were employed as the contractor, and demolition and groundwork commenced in August.
The News Centre at Hilsea has seen many improvements and extensions since the site replaced the old centre in Stanhope Road in1969, where we went from hot metal to Web offset litho and the computer generation in one step.
The printing industry has progressed rapidly in recent years, and the demand for more colour, especially by estate agents, in all publications meant that our old facility, which could only print 64 out of 96 pages in colour, was falling well short of what was required. The need for more colour in the main newspaper, stitched supplements meant things had to change if we were to maximise advertising revenue.
 The investment on this site will amount to approximately £56 million pounds, a huge cost that reinforces the confidence of the Johnston board in our potential and also the future of the printed word.
This investment in conjunction with News International, Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, meant we were able to install a more costly state of the art press centre for our own use but allow us the capacity to print The Sun and The News of the World across the south for the next 15 years.
Other technological changes are also taking place. The new video technology being employed by our reporters allows them to video the interview for inclusion on our website. This is also updated constantly throughout the day in order to bring up to the minute stories to our readers.
The new Man Roland printing press is only the third of its kind to be installed in the UK, the first one for Johnston Press being installed in Sheffield at Dinnington.
The new facility will give us enhanced production and enable us to print at approximately 82,000 copies per hour or more than 24 copies a second, producing 5.8million copies per week. This is a 25% improvement over the 60,000 previously achieved.
When this new press is fully operational towards the middle of this year, the two old presses will be decommissioned and a new robotically controlled reel store will be installed. Paper will be delivered, bar coded stored and retrieved electronically and delivered to the press with the minimum of delay by 'robots' guided by wires in the floor. How far have we come since the days of Guttenburg and Caxton!
To keep up with this increased production speed, the printing plates from AGFA's Computer to Plate (CTP) system can produce approximately 200 plates an hour. The days of bromide and negatives are long gone. Lasers transfer the electronic images direct to the four Polaris lines. This allows an increase in speed with enhanced quality, as the image will be in exactly the same position for each of the four plates: black, cyan, magenta and yellow, around 12,000 plates will be produced in total each week. We have come from producing 96 pages of colour using six units at present, to one unit on the new MAN press being able to produce 48 pages of colour with ten units available!
This is the future and the way forward, and The News Portsmouth is proud to be in the forefront of print technology. |
