By: Mark Fitzgerald Operations director Dan O'Brien does a little bit of everything at The Pantagraph, says Linda Loftus, publisher and president of Pantagraph Publishing Co.
There's the installation of the new circulation system, the new editorial system, the new library system: O'Brien handled those. He synched up the newspaper's e-mail with the system used by new owners Lee Enterprises. And it was O'Brien who was tapped by Lee to run its employee safety committee.
Right now, the Pantagraph is completely renovating its 1960s-era office building. That's O'Brien's job, too. "In addition to being an excellent operations director, which is Dan's title, he is a leader within the organization in all that we do, from strategic planning to employee relations," the publisher says.
But for all his many responsibilities inside or outside the lines of the Pantagraph's organizational chart, perhaps the biggest challenge O'Brien faces day in and day out is the paper's most basic task: Printing lots of quality color in an ever-shrinking production window with a 31-year-old Goss Cosmo offset press.
"The Cosmo was not really designed as a color press, so it presents a lot of challenges in getting the quality of color that today's products require," O'Brien says in the laconic manner of a veteran pressman who's learned to wring the best out of an all-but-forgotten press model.
Basically a double-wide Urbanite, the Cosmo was designed to allow smaller papers to run a little bit of decent color. Only 45 Cosmos ? serial numbers 3500 to 3544 ? were ever built, mostly because the industry was soon demanding presses that could print tons of high-quality color.
Nowadays, the Pantagraph's Cosmo (serial number 3516) prints plenty of color for the 47,665-circulation daily, the company's chain of weeklies, the Sunday color comics, a real estate book, a TV tab, and some commercial work.
By necessity, the pressroom pre-runs a lot of products for later insertion ? which creates its own issues. "You eat up your maintenance and cleaning times, and you've got to be diligent about maintenance and cleaning," he notes. All maintenance is done in-house by a press crew, each member of which starts ? as O'Brien did back in 1974 ? by serving a four-year apprenticeship doing everything on the Cosmo.
As for cleanliness, publisher Lindus says the pressroom floor "is so clean you can practically eat off it."
O'Brien's Pantagraph crew keeps the Cosmo handling every new pressure of newspaper production in the age of the Internet. Most recently, the newspaper moved to lightweight newsprint. Web breaks are up slightly, but waste still runs just around 4% for the main product.
Keeping equipment going is what makes O'Brien so valuable to the paper, says General Manager Barry Winterland. He says his operations director has "virtually doubled the life of our inserting equipment by rebuilding instead of purchasing."
But it's not as if the Pantagraph refuses to join the modern age. It was fully paginated long before most papers of its size, and now it is ready to move to direct-to-plate. Or, as O'Brien might say, direct-to-plate is ready for the newspaper.
O'Brien, 58, has worked production at the Pantagraph almost exactly as long as its Cosmo. "I love it," he says of newspaper work. "Every day is different, and I guess I just thrive on the pressure of the deadlines. I suppose when I do retire at some point, I won't miss the 2 a.m. phone calls ... and I do get them routinely."
But he's not ready for retirement ? and neither is the Cosmo. "We assume we're going to run this for at least another eight or 10 years," O'Brien says. "It's a nice press, and it's awfully hard to justify a $15 million purchase."
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:Joined The Pantagraph as a pressroom apprentice in 1974
Named assistant foreman in 1984 and made night foreman the next spring
Promoted to pressroom manager in 1989; served as interim production manager in 1990; named production manager in 1991
Promoted to production director in 1995
Served as director of operations since 2001
Helped found and lead the Midwest Regional Newspaper Safety Consortium
Past president of Illinois Production Group
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