As the US industry comes to terms with the fact that print is not dead - and that revenue from it might even be easier to secure than digital - a variety of solutions are being used to catch up on the lack of investment in colour capacity in past years.

New large press installations have been relatively rare, with the KBA Commander CL press Hearst installed in Albany, New York, and the Goss Uniliner which took the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette out of the "dark ages" of letterpress and flexo, among notable exceptions. Hearst also drove Transcontinental's Northern California plant development - based on hybrid manroland Colorman XXL presses, now seven years ago - with a contract to print the San Francisco Chronicle.

A few publishers have upgraded existing presses to make them more flexible including, curiously, GateHouse Media which has ploughed more money into the 30-year-old flexo presses at its Providence Journal in Rhode Island.

And there have been "new" old presses: Dutch used equipment merchant GWS has sold a 14-unit Goss Urbanite from a Swedish site to an undisclosed US customer, with commercial director Eric van Kessel calling the trend "a logical step" in preparing the newspaper printing industry for "the future to come".

Another is Lee Enterprises in Mason City, Iowa, which announced with some pride that it was installing a refurbished ten-unit Goss Urbanite - replacing a Motter flexo line - to assure the future of the Globe Gazette and three affiliated weeklies. Lee obviously likes Urbanites, and at its Times and Democrat, spent $500,000 rebuilding a seven-unit press - "the biggest investment in the press since it was installed four decades before" - although another at the Napa Valley Register has been scrapped after being damaged in an earthquake, prompting a decision to outsource printing and sell the $5 million property.



Perhaps the boldest - and certainly the largest - of the "old is new" installations however, is in the Boston suburb of Taunton, where more than a hundred old Urbanite units, many from USA Today sites, have been rounded up and corralled into a former warehouse as part of the new FlexPress being assembled by Jim Gore's Pressline Services for John Henry's flagship Boston Globe.

Instead of the flexible four-high, sometimes compact towers now popular in current new press installations, the FlexPress concept has lines - Pressline calls them "zones" - typically of two and three-high units each served by a splicer, the web then turned and collated into a folder. At the Taunton site - acquired for a reported $20 million - four of these tall, custom-built affairs with three sets of stacked double formers perhaps somewhat negating the height argument, support the 22 "zones".

Taking advantage of the 889 mm (36") maximum web width of the original Urbanite units, Pressline has re-engineered plate cylinders to accommodate three forms of variable width, up to 12" wide.

Pressline has already taken the lateral thinking of its 3V folder - in which one revolution delivers three cut-offs and a multi-section tabloid - to the double-width TKS lines of the Columbus Dispatch, but the Urbanite units at Taunton are (or were) single-width.

Refurbishment there includes Perretta motorised fountains, technotrans dampening, and plate lockups from Nela - with whom Pressline worked on the Columbus project - with individual Bosch Rexroth drives under EAE control to make the former Urbanite units shaftless. Another key component is automatic colour register, placed with Baldwin unit WPC before EAE, which is owned by and works closely with QI Press Controls, became involved.

It's this state-of-the-art control technology which will bring the project - based on small groups of press units of a design which was popular between the 1960s and 1990s - to life, but the jury is still out on how labour-intensive it will be to operate. And why single-width, when more productive kit is being scrapped all around the world? At least most of the presses - with the exception of the tall folder superstructures - is at floor level, contributing to industrial relations benefits.



Like Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, billionaire John Henry - who also owns the Liverpool FC soccer club and Red Sox baseball team, currently third on the MLB's American League East - has a reputation for looking at the news media industry from a fresh perspective.

In April, he invited journalists and others to rethink the newspaper's strategy and coverage priorities, with editor Brian McGrory effectively asking editors how they would run the paper: "If a wealthy individual was to give us funding to launch a news organisation designed to take on the Boston Globe, what would it look like?"

Like all rich men, Henry didn't get that way by spending more than he needed, witness the deal on the neglected warehouse, and on the Globe itself for that matter. The $70 million he paid for it in October 2013 was a fraction of the record $1.1 billion that changed hands when the New York Times Company had acquired it 20 years before.

The self-appointed publisher doesn't always get things right first time however, and there was a huge delivery disruption with a switch of newspaper distribution contractors last December. While the situation is reported to be settling, one industry commentator remarked that new delivery routes looked as if they had been drawn up by someone on meth.

The new Taunton print site is also radical, and the industry will be watching with interest to see how it pans out.

Peter Coleman