Chronicle’s Goss Uniliner press represents a new era

The Houston Chronicle is making a $10 million investment in a modern printing press, capable of churning out new editions of regional and national newspapers for the next half century. 

The new Goss Uniliner press, built over the past year in the room that used to store reams of paper, began printing most Chronicle print jobs in late January.

By DUG BEGLEY, Houston Chronicle

Work seemingly never stops, with the Chronicle averaging about 115 press jobs per week, across ten daily newspapers most nights, along with special sections and contracted advertising jobs. Each week, that adds up to about 2.3 million papers produced for Houston Chronicle, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and papers in Austin, San Antonio, Laredo and Beaumont.

“We do consider ourselves a Texas printing hub,” Chronicle Publisher Nancy Meyer said.

Compared to the 1980s, printing is in decline, but where newspaper competition and advertising drove innovation then, consolidation is driving it now. Sure, there are not as many pieces of paper to print anymore, but there are also fewer places to do it.

New presses, Chronicle officials said, allow for less waste and maintenance issues, meaning more efficient work at a time when other presses are seeing an end to their useful lives.

“Our current one has lasted about 50 years,” said Joel Meyer, the paper’s vice president of operations. “We would expect this to last about the same.”

The press was moved from Pittsburgh.

The new press, a single system about 40 feet tall, is capable of printing 80,000 newspapers an hour. That’s about double what the crew could get from the old press, which chuffs and hisses next door and remains in use.

The new press, which along with installation and training press operators cost about $10 million, allows the press room to print more efficiently in almost every way. Less paper is wasted because the test runs needed on the older manual press are far less because the computerized newer press can adjust itself in seconds to print clean copies. Fewer spoiled papers is less ink, which means printing 100,000 papers or more takes less time.

Meyer, meanwhile, isn’t struggling to keep an aging beast of a press pumping out copies.

“I can still find parts when this one breaks,” he said of the new press.

The new press also requires fewer workers, who can carry out multiple tasks, Meyer said. Press operators at the Chronicle have spent the past months preparing for the switch, and learning a new way of working, as their workspace changed to accommodate the new press.

“It is an adjustment and a continuing adjustment,” Meyer said. 

Lots of Groundwork 

Installing a printing press isn’t like plugging in a new printer in the office. At more than three stories tall, it pulls rolls of paper 66 inches wide through four press units, rolls color onto them and then folds and sorts them.

All that motion, as any high school physics student can attest, leads to an equal and opposite reaction. Set the press down on a simple concrete floor, and it would shake the building down around it.

Meyer said locating the new press in a room that used to store rolls of paper meant architectural and engineering analysis, city permits and inspections to excavate below where the press would rest. Construction included laying an estimated 6,000 feet of steel rebar within 1,000 cubic yards of concrete, Meyer said.

As they transition to the new press, the old one will not go away, said Scott Kattner, press room manager for the Chronicle. Some jobs in the press room because of the size of the papers – 24 page sections as opposed to 12 pages, for example – are better left to the old blue Goliath seething in the room next door.

And in a world of redundancies and power outages and parts shortages, the old press could at any time be pressed into emergency service if the new one has an issue. 

“It’ll still be running,” Kattner said.

For Chronicle veterans, the new press is both an end and a beginning. A changing business cannot adapt with decades-old equipment, but consolidation has made printing presses rarer commodities.

Power of the Press

There was a time when they were massive assets, recalled Jack Sweeney, who was publisher of the Chronicle from 2000 to 2012 and started with the company in 1980. The Chronicle’s downtown Houston presses could not keep up with the newer offset presses of the Houston Post – the ones being replaced now, Sweney said. So the Chronicle bought a printing company in Denver Harbor in the early 1990s simply so it could do quality color special sections.

“We had to beat the Post to stay alive,” Sweeney said. “The papers were neck and neck.”

At that time, many presses around the Houston area could do commercial jobs. Now there are fewer, especially for printing color on newsprint.

As a result, Sweeney said, he sees the new press as both the end of a large press era and the beginning of another.

“They were always a tool, a big tool that made the newspaper possible,” he said. “As the importance of the print package… diminishes … that changes but there is always something to print. Just look at your mail.” “There is no lamenting,” Sweeney added. “Now it is a tool that says we are the only one left standing.”

This article was originally published in the Feb. 15 edition of the Houston Chronicle.