Production All-Stars, Press: John Rodney

By: With one project after another, there's been no winding down into retirement for John Rodney. In fact, he postponed his last day at The Press by two months.

But early last month the last day came. His responsibilities for plant, printing, and packaging are now managed by, respectively, the chief financial officer, recently promoted Production Manager Tom Bright, and the circulation department.

Rodney gained early experience in production management at Gannett dailies across the country. But perhaps his more interesting locations (and notable contributions) came later at family-owned papers all closer to his New Jersey home, starting at the Easton (Pa.) Express, where he installed keyless indirect letterpress devised by the old newspaper Research Institute, in a project with unanticipated connections to all the jobs that followed.

That "first truly keyless-inking press in the U.S.," he says, was a precursor to newspaper flexography, which Rodney helped pioneer more than 20 years ago at Maine's Portland Newspapers. While helping organize and lead the flexo user group, he also relentlessly attacked problems of an established printing process that at the time was still new to newspapers.

"We all went through the start of flexo, doing the dog paddle and trying to keep our heads above the water," recalls Lemont Haas, production manager at the Manchester-based New Hampshire Union Leader. "We were just trying to get a paper out" that displeased neither publisher nor reader. Eventually flexo improved, but instead of sitting back satisfied with a good-looking paper, Rodney "kept trying new and different things. It isn't easy to do that when you're comfortable with the products you're using."

Calling Rodney "one of the folks who sustains flexo," Haas cited the most recent example last month: "Today he's running ceramic-dipped doctor blades" ? a costlier alternative, but one that appears to improve quality and service life.

It was through the Research Institute (also in Easton but soon merged with NAA's predecessor) that Rodney would work with longtime NAA engineer Harshad Matalia and get to know the technology executives at an association where he would serve as Newspaper Services Director after leaving Portland.

From there, Rodney returned after 31 years to the Garden State. Though he's now left The Press of Atlantic City, he's left it an old press that his team can count on for perhaps another 10 years.

Rodney also left it with a legacy of safety (auto-locking press doors, and 40% fewer accidents with 41% lower severity, leading to 97% fewer lost days, according to Publisher Keith Dawn) and well-prepared production personnel. At the front end, a month before Y2K he got the newsroom onto a new system (replaced three years ago when the company consolidated IT functions).

His last major project in the packaging area was a big storage facility completed last year after existing storage space was the only available site for a new Titan G60 inserter from K&M, which also rebuilt the older Harris machines "from the ground up" for weekday inserting. Delayed city approvals forced him to rely on rental storage units in the paper's parking lot.

The Press was among sites that converted letterpresses to flexo. Besides ceaseless tweaking of the flexo process, Rodney ensured that the near-40-year-old Hoe Colormatic keeps printing, and at an economical web width. To Harrisburg, Pa., he sent a team and hired an erector to reclaim a folder, "from the reelroom up to the balloon level," along with drives, controls, clutches and every sort of spare part from the "virtually identical" press at The Patriot-News. Another team trucked back from Tennessee "things more specific to flexo" from The Knoxville News Sentinel's "very similar" Hoe conversion, idle since the that newspaper's move to a new, offset plant.

"Since then," he adds, "we acquired a lathe and a milling machine. So we're able to make parts," saving money and time.

In June and July his staff alone performed cut-downs, including their own machine work, on both presses for web-width reductions. Not until those press projects were behind him would Rodney call it a career.

Career Highlights
Apprentice stereotyper, Courier-News, Plainfield, N.J., 1965

Rutgers Univ. management graduate and Gannett Co. production assistant, 1973

Production manager, Gannett newspapers, until 1978

Production director, Easton (Pa.) Express, until 1984

Joined Portland (Maine) Newspapers, an early flexo printing site

Started narrow-web flexo anilox roll business, 1993

Joined NAA Technology Dept. as Newspaper Services director, 1994

The Press of Atlantic City operations director, 1996