SUN-TIMES REDESIGN HALTED BY EQUIPMENT NIGHTMARE

By: Mark Fitzgerald Newspaper: We've Had It With New Press, By Goss!



The Chicago Sun-Times' long-promised relaunch with a dramatic redesign
to show off its offset color capabilities has been stopped dead in its
tracks by an equipment nightmare at its brand-new $100-million
production plant.



Copies are emerging from the plant that are barely saleable: Color
reproduction is often muddy, and black-and-white inking on the page
can range from almost unreadably light to oversaturated and splotchy.
Individual issues occasionally contain evidence of so many printing
problems that they look as if they were specially prepared for use as
examples at a technology seminar.



At the center of the tabloid's problems, Sun-Times executives said,
are the six Newsliner double-wide color offset printing presses from
Goss Graphic Systems Inc., headquartered in nearby Westmont, Ill. All
other equipment works fine, the executives said.



'It isn't even all of the press that's working badly,' said Jack
Ferguson, vice president of production for Sun-Times owner Hollinger
International Inc. A veteran of offset conversions, Ferguson ran a
Goss Urbanite in 1966 at Mirror Group's 'experimental' plant in
Belfast, Northern Ireland, moved to the bigger Goss Metros in
Scotland in the 1970s, and by the mid-'90s was converting Southam
Inc.'s Vancouver dailies from flexo to MAN Roland offset.



'It all comes back to areas of Goss responsibility with either
defective engineering, defective manufacturing, or defective
installation, and a failure to correct things,' he said.



Some examples, Ferguson said: A press protection system made by
Baldwin Technology Co., but altered by Goss during installation
malfunctioned so badly that the newsprint web repeatedly broke and
wrapped around parts, damaging blanket rollers, inking drums, and
other vital components. Installation of one press was delayed for
months while Goss employees cannibalized it to replace parts
damaged by these web wraparounds. A Goss dampening system vital
for printing readable pages has never worked properly, he said.
The tensioning system, which helps ensure that color photographs
are crisp, remains 'an area of mystery because Goss has never
explained it perhaps because they can't,' Ferguson said.



Converting from letterpress which the Sun-Times has run on presses
Goss installed in 1957 to offset can be a difficult process. At
least one Goss service manager blames the problems on older,
unionized Sun-Times pressmen who refuse to change old habits. But
Ferguson said the biggest problems on the new Goss presses are
caused by the poor operation of their folders a part that is the
same on letterpress or offset.



Tensions during installation grew so intense that last month the
Sun-Times locked Goss service personnel out of the printing plant.
According to a person familiar with the incident, Goss employees
were escorted, one at a time, by security guards into the plant to
retrieve their tools and then sent home.



'I kicked them out because they were causing more delays by being
on-site than not,' Ferguson said. On its best nights, the paper
prints about three-quarters of its 482,000-plus copies on the offset
presses, and the rest on its downtown letterpress units.



The paper is refusing to make any further payments on the press, and
litigation looks likely. In recent years, only one other big Goss
installation wound up in court a case involving, as it happens, the
first Newsliner, purchased by New York's Daily News, whose lawsuit
concerning its installation and operation was dismissed.



Ferguson said he's now convinced that Goss decided long ago to
essentially abandon the Sun-Times project. 'Since the end of last
year, there have been fewer and fewer Goss people on-site, and it
became clearer and clearer that this was a predetermined course of
activity,' he said.



Goss executives would not comment, Marketing Director Barbara L.
Gora said, citing a policy of not discussing customers.



Certainly, Hollinger is a big customer: Goss presses print all the
chain's metros in Canada and Britain and nearly all its smaller papers.
But now, Ferguson said, Goss is telling Hollinger's North American
papers that it will no longer provide parts or service for their
presses because of the Sun-Times dispute.



Meanwhile, the tab's newsroom is champing at the bit to implement the
redesign, said new Sun-Times Editor in Chief Michael Cooke, who added,
'But there's no point putting in a redesign when it can't run on
one-quarter to one-third of the papers.'



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Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at
large for E&P.







(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher