Following a trend seen right across the global media landscape, advertising revenues in Fairfax Media’s print division have plummeted just as online ad sales have skyrocketed. But instead of Fairfax going to war with itself, so to speak, the company has focused on making its print offering more attractive and relevant to advertisers, as well as concentrating on something that newspapers have always done best: being reliable. While regaining and retaining relevance is the biggest challenge for anyone in the newspaper game, Peters and his team can never lose sight of the fact that being on time is the most important consideration.
“There’s a lot of passion that goes into making sure our products go out on time,” he says. “There’s a belief that every day we affect people’s lives. If someone is getting a home-delivered product, they’re going to walk out on their front lawn expecting to see the paper. If it’s not there, there’s a reaction to that. We take that very, very seriously.”
ProPrint was recently given an exclusive tour of the Chullora facility during a late-night printing shift. The print plant is one of Fairfax’s biggest and is home to daily production of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, the Australian Financial Review, as well as regional Fairfax publications such as the Bathurst-based Western Advocate and free community newspapers such as the bi-weekly St George and Sutherland Leader.
There’s no black magic at work behind the closed doors of the 28,500m2 factory. Anyone hoping for a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-esque revelation will be disappointed. One of Australia’s biggest print shops is much like its SME counterparts out there in the commercial world. The processes required to produce a Fairfax newspaper are similar to any offset print job at print houses up and down the country: from plate, to print, to folding and insertion, and distribution.
The difference, of course, is the scale. Chullora’s pre-press unit can process up to 1,000 plates per hour and produce more than 20,000 plates a week. The plant produces 68,000 tons of print per year (the equivalent of 24 billion tabloid pages) and runs through 1,200 newsprint reels every week. These are stored in an area that comprises 32 reel stands, three cranes and 3,000 storage cells. Reels are shifted around and stored by 16 laser-guided vehicles. Ten million pre-prints, catalogues and magazines are inserted per week.
Another key difference is the use of ‘buffers’: everything coming off the press is wound up onto prints rolls (known as N290s) and later unwound for insertion. While this primarily allows pre-prints to be stored until they’re ready to be inserted into the main book, the buffer process is also used during regular production as a way of ensuring that the plant doesn’t have to stop its printing presses if there is a problem in the inserting operations.
On the equipment side, four plate lines are used, comprising four Krause plate exposure units, four Haase plate-processing units, and four Nela plate bending units. Printing is handled by 24 full-colour double-width Colorman S units, while the finishing operations consist of five jaw folders, seven inserting machines, five adhesive note machines, 28 stackers, and 21 loading docks. As for those N290s used for storage – there are 510 of them.
This all adds up to an operation that can produce a full-colour 96pp broadsheet in one pass at up to 60,000 copies per hour (1,600 broadsheet pages per second).
Peters pulled himself away from the relentless deadline pressure to act as ProPrint’s personal tour guide through the facility. It’s a generous gesture from a man who oversees an uncompromising schedule in order get Fairfax’s products out the door every night without fail.
“A newspaper has got a very short shelf life, even shorter now given the other media that are available to people, so on-time delivery is absolutely critical, has always been, and will continue to be.”
Hitting deadlines
A typical night shift sees the final editorial content of the newspapers ‘locked in’ by 9pm, though it is common for this deadline to be overrun by 15 minutes or so. After that, Peters says the presses usually start around 9.45pm and “definitely by 10pm”, with the first truck departing the lot at 10.50pm.
The plant uses a distribution network that splits NSW and the Sydney metro areas into seven key zones, which are serviced by five different transport suppliers. The first trucks to leave the plant are bound for Tamworth, Dubbo, Griffith, and Grafton. The last ones leave at 4am to service the Sydney metropolitan area. There is also scope on the weekend for ‘return runs’, with some trucks returning to the plant to handle another load of deliveries for the metro market.
If you’re getting the impression that timeliness is valued above all else, you’re wrong. Peters says the “overriding mantra” at the plant is that “no job will be done unless it’s done safely” (so much so that this motto is emblazoned on the back of every staff member’s shirt). But on-time delivery is still a critical KPI at Chullora.
“Our staff know that nightly production is very important. At night you get a real sense of the urgency in what people are doing, though it’s a controlled urgency.”
Chullora really comes to life after the sun goes down. The night shift is make or break time. Much of the work during the day is occupied doing ‘pre-prints’ for the Herald and Fin. Supplements and sections that aren’t as “time-sensitive”, lifestyle section Good Living, perhaps, are printed and stored in readiness for their insertion inside the main book later that evening.
The plant goes into overdrive over the weekend. The first peak comes during production of the bulkier Saturday edition of the Herald and Sun-Herald. The 2am to 2pm Friday morning shift is devoted to producing Saturday Herald inserts and supplements, such as Spectrum, Traveller, Drive, MyCareer and Domain, while the Friday evening shift is devoted to producing more up-to-date sections such as general news, sport and business.
If the other shifts are small skirmishes and melees in the production battle, then the Saturday night shift is the final push over the top, when Chullora faces the highest workload of the week. Production is focused on the Sun-Herald and its many supplements. Up to 120 staff will be working at the plant during this shift (during a typical Monday morning shift – one of the lightest shifts – roughly 40 ?staff will be on-site) and 120 drivers will pick up delivery loads.
“During those three periods, you’re actually using most of the equipment in the plant,” says Peters.
But even a typical weekday edition can present challenges for the plant.
“In theory, it’s a ‘9pm lock-up, last truck out at 4am’ scenario for Monday to Friday. In practice, it’s a different complexity each night of the week depending on a number of variables, such as the size of the book, the number of inserts, how big those inserts are. When we know we’ve got a particularly complex product to produce, we’ll actually say to Editorial: ‘Guys, we really need your attention on deadline tonight, because it’s a pretty tough night’.
”?A print man like Peters must be guided by the principle of on-time delivery, but this has to be weighed against a newspaper reader’s need for up-to-date news. It is this balancing act that brings about that classic newspaper print room scenario – the ‘stop the presses’ scene. Peters has steadied the ship through some of recent memory’s biggest such moments. He recalls 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, and the Beaconsfield mining disaster and rescue as three historical events that have dramatically altered the course of a normal production. The plant also needs to be mindful of late news that can be anticipated but not printed, such as results of sporting events.
“If there’s a major overseas sporting event on, we’ll sometimes work with the publisher to co-ordinate the job,” he says, pointing to regulars on the sporting calendar such as Wimbledon finals, the World Cup, and Olympic Games events.
“We’re constantly having discussions about how we can deliver late, big news.”
One recent example was the final race of the Formula 1 Drivers Championship. Mark Webber was competing for the title in a race that took place at around 11pm. Fairfax intentionally held back 50,000 copies of the Herald intended for the metro market until the result was known.
Adverts that work
Producing more complex advertising formats has also become more common for the plant as it seeks to stay competitive. Online advertising is still very much in its infancy, but has already advanced rapidly beyond the days of pop-ups and banners ads. Homepage skins, viral videos, ‘peel-backs’ and sponsored search engine results are the du jour of the modern media age.
As a result, Fairfax’s newspapers have been forced to catch up and add new advertising formats to its repertoire.
“If we go back about five or six years, I’d term this operation as something of a ‘sausage factory’, in that we had a standardised product that we got out to market as quickly as we could,” says Peters.
“Back then we almost had too much to do and we were struggling to find space to print things, whereas now we’re working much closer with publishers to find ways to make newspapers a stronger medium for advertisers, and to help them reach their audience in innovative ways.
”?By way of demonstration, Peters holds up a standard broadsheet page, before elaborately tearing the pages in certain patterns to illustrate the variety of formats now offered to advertisers through the creative engineering of their presses, such as broadsheet front page spinal wraps, broadsheet spinal folds, internal spinal folds, transparent front page wraps, partial tabloid page folds and tabloid pop-ups (see box, this page).
Rather than coming from Manroland, the manufacturer of Chullora’s press equipment, the techniques to offer these capabilities were actually developed by Fairfax’s internal creative development team, Fairfax 360, in conjunction with staff at Chullora. Peters says the plant works closely with the rest of the Fairfax Media organisation to develop and trial new ideas in the press room.
“We’re actually using our equipment far more effectively and smartly,” he says.
“That teamwork has been very effective.”
Another change at Chullora has been the move to take on more commercial work. The Chullora plant has traditionally been one of the most heavily focused on internal production of Fairfax material, while the other 14 Fairfax Print centres in Australia produce a larger proportion of commercial work. But this is changing, as the company looks to extract more profitability from its print division.
“Five years ago, we would have been doing 100% internal work, but we’re doing a number of commercial jobs as well,” says Peters. “I think that trend will probably continue. In five years time, it’s possible that commercial jobs could be up to 25% of our work.”
Peters says the plant is “getting more aggressive” in its pursuit of commercial work, which is primarily made up of non-Fairfax newspapers and direct mail campaigns. Peters is also hoping to capture a portion of the commercial work that is traditionally the domain of heatset printers, with Chullora recently completing a merchandise catalogue for a Sydney-based professional sports team (Peters stop short of revealing specifics).
Commercial aims
But despite this assault on the commercial market, the company hasn’t employed the services of a dedicated sales team, or indeed a single salesperson. Rather, the responsibility is shared between Peters, the operations manager and the production planning manager.
“The three of us dedicate some of our time to identifying and understanding the needs of our commercial clients and then attempt to provide valuable solutions for them,” he says.
Peters enjoys dealing directly with prospects and clients. He says the response from commercial customers is particularly positive when they know they are dealing with the person who is actually responsible for printing their job.
“We know exactly what we can deliver and the options that they have, and in the first meeting we can get a lot of information for them at once instead of a salesperson who has to say ‘I’ll get back to you and see if we can do it’, or over-promises.”
The imperative to make the print department more profitable has partially been driven by the rise of digital and internet technologies. Peters acknowledges that the remarkable growth of Fairfax Digital, which continued to post double-digit growth throughout the global economic downturn, has ramped up the pressure on Fairfax Printers to become more efficient.
“You’ve got to get your machinery to work harder for longer. Investing in printing technology is a little bit harder to get funding for considering you’ve got other business units such as Digital that are growing quite strongly,” he says.
When the Chullora plant was opened in 1995, its use of an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) and laser-guided vehicles (LGVs) was at the bleeding edge, as was its automated buffer system. Now, Peters admits that the Chullora site is no longer one of the leaders on the international stage, particularly where automation is concerned.
“You’ve got plants now being built that have got automated plate delivery to the press and automatic plating up of the press, so that there’s no human intervention at all from making plates through to starting the press,” he says.
One of the major changes in Chullora’s operations since it was opened has been the introduction of CTP. Peters notes that, like many newspaper printers, the plant was actually somewhat late in deploying such technology.
“When we got the cost modelling for CTP, it didn’t make sense for a long time until the price of plates came down, even though there was clearly a quality benefit. Quality is one thing, but it needs to be commercially viable as well.”
Once the system was installed in 2007, the plant was able to reduce its pre-press team from 14 people to eight.
“One of the things about CTP is it reduces the number of staff required to make plates. We’re actually quite light on in that department if you consider the amount of plates we produce,” says Peters.
The plant’s most recent major automation investment was a $5m Muller Martini MPC (Mailroom Production Control) system. Essentially, it is a complex system of conveyor belts that work to ensure the right newspapers end up in the right loading docks for the delivery trucks. The installation of this system in 2007 allowed Fairfax to eliminate its reliance on using casual staff in loading docks during peak periods, as well as reducing print waste.
It will be Fairfax’s appetite to invest in this kind of technology that will ensure Chullora keeps its place on the media landscape, today and in the future.
Advertising medium fits the message
Newspapers might be one of the oldest forms of media, but there’s still room for innovation. With pressure from competing channels, the need to offer fresh ideas to advertisers is more pressing than ever. Chullora general manager Paul Peters says Fairfax is seen as an industry leader in bringing new cold-set printing innovations to the market, and as such has had to look at new ways to offer value to advertisers with its printed products.
“Our presses have historically run three conventional reel sizes: full-size (1,620mm), three-quarter (1,215mm) and a half-size (810mm),” says Peters.
“That’s what the control systems were designed to run. We have come up with ways to run reduce reel width to do different size pages.”
Peters rattles of a list of different possibilities: broadsheet front page spinal wraps, broadsheet spinal folds, internal spinal folds, transparent front page wraps, partial tabloid page folds and tabloid pop-ups. The plant has only been offering the options for the past 18 months.
Another innovation has been the use of transparent wraps. Peters cites a job done from Toyota two years ago that used a see-through substrate “a bit like tracing paper”, in layman’s terms.
In addition to unconventional folds and stocks, they have also pioneered the use of micro-encapsulated scent technology for perfume ads. Peters believes the Chullora plant was the first in the world to deploy the technology in this manner. The system uses special scent technology, compressed air and ‘fit for purpose’ spray nozzles applied between the top of the printing unit and the folder.
Business briefing – remaining relevant
· Fairfax’s 28,500m2 print plant in Chullora in Sydney is one of the biggest newspaper print sites in the country.
· For general manager Paul Peters, on-time delivery is paramount, and requires superhuman efforts every day, from the lightest shift (around 40 staff on a Monday morning) to the heaviest (Saturday night shift production of the Sun-Herald).
· The print team has to balance the need for on-time delivery with the requirement to include the most up-to-date news content.
· Fairfax’s heritage in the printed word is under pressure from other media channels, especially online.
· Fairfax is devising many ways to ensure printing plants such as Chullora stay relevant and competitive in this new media landscape.
· All Fairfax print sites do some commercial work, and this volume is growing. It is possible that commercial work would comprise 25% of Chullora’s output within five years.
· Peters and his team keep newspaper as a relevant and dynamic advertising medium by offering new and innovative possibilities, such as unique folds or micro-encapsulation.
Factfile
Location – Chullora, NSW (20km west of Sydney CBD)
Size – 28,500m2, built on 10.1ha property
Staff – 230 permanent full-time, 140 casual
Volume -13 million newspapers / sections are printed per week
Machinery –
• Pre-press: four platelines, comprising kit from Krause, Haase and Nela
• Printing: 24 full-colour double-width Manroland Colorman
S units –
• Finishing: Five 2:5:5 jaw folders, three back-up drum folders, and seven Muller Martini inserting machines
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