Carrying a torch, so to speak, for Goss’s new Magnum Compact press is a company literally at the height of fashion.

Advance Publications doesn’t just publish the daily Staten Island Advance: Through Conde Nast, it owns Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as a host of new-age publications like Wired, a cable TV channel and a cluster of digital properties.

It is also notable – and unusual in today’s newspaper industry – in two further respects: It is still family owned and reportedly free of debt.

And as the home of the world’s first Goss Magnum Compact press. Because at its heart, Advance is also a newspaper and commercial printing outfit with a lot of titles to print.

With up to 80 edition changes a day, seconds count – and can mount up – and Advance came to Goss International’s Shanghai facility with very specific ideas about what it required – an edition change in less than two minutes 15 seconds (135 seconds) – and was favourably impressed when the maker kept clipping seconds off that, Shanghai engineering director Jean Claude Pautrat told me on Monday.

The six-tower press will be first press of its kind installed in the world and will be a valuable reference site for Goss in its spiritual heartland of North America.

At its office in Grasmere, Advance currently prints a mass of contract and inhouse work on a double-width manroland Geoman, and it hopes the Magnum Compact will add versatile, short-run capability to that, while coming close to matching the output of the older press, to be retained to print the daily newspaper.

A team from Advance Publications were among the first to see live print tests at the Goss Graphic Systems (China) manufacturing facility in Shanghai.

Director of production John Giustiniani says the company had looked at inkjet digital printing as well as both single and double-width offset options to support “a vision of a modern, multi-product print operation”.

He says versatility, job-change speed, print quality and “simple cost-effective operation” make the new highly-automated Goss “the right press to meet our needs”.

In a press statement he praises the “clever configuration” which takes advantage of the 2.19 metres high towers, and the new press is certainly being shoehorned into an existing building with a minimum of modification… and the N40 folder on a floor above.

Goss’s Autoplate technology – which was being finetuned when GXpress visited the manufacturing site this week – was a key factor in the buying decision. Giustiniani says fast makereadies for successive jobs will be a key to the success of his company’s business model. “The ability to go from job to job in two minutes or less with extremely low waste and operator effort makes this press cost competitive with digital printing at around 1000 copies,” he says.

The new press will be in operation in October.

The history of Goss’s first Magnum Compact customer is at least as fascinating as the technology I watched in operation this week: Wikipedia relates that printer John Crawford and businessman James Kennedy launched the Richmond County Advance in 1886 at a time when the number of daily newspapers in the New York borough ran into double figures. It survived by growing circulation – from 4500 in 1910 to more than 80,000 in the 1990s – and through the canny instincts of Samuel Newhouse, who began work for its owner in 1908, was a partner with him in the Bayonne Times by the time he was 21, and bought the Staten Island paper in 1922.

Newhouse boosted circulation by backing a newsstand entrepreneur and, when everyone else’s money ran out during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he went on buying newspapers. He picked up the Long Island Press and its competitors in Jamaica, and the Newark Star and newspapers in Syracuse. More titles followed in the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1959 he bought fashion publisher Conde Nast… reputedly as an anniversary present for his wife.

Advance owns cable operator Bright House Networks, digital publishers ZipList, Reddit.com and Wired.com, while print titles include the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Today, Advance Publications is America’s 53rd largest private company according to Forbes, with 25,000 employees and annual turnover of $6.56 billion.

Newhouse died in 1979, but the business has been continued first by his sons, SI Newhouse Jr and Donald Newhouse – now both in their 80s – and family members who are among its key executives. Although the office in Grasmere is effectively the headquarters for Advance Publications, there’s a sense the business is still quick on its feet. Biographer Thomas Maier says Newhouse senior ran the business from a brown leather suitcase, with all the figures in his head, and you could believe that tradition continues.

The new Goss press will help keep the company nimble.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Executives from Advance Publications with Goss in Shanghai for print tests (from left) Peng Yong (Goss), Ben Liang (Goss), Keith Dawn (associate publisher of Staten Island Advance), Wesley Clements (Goss), Mark Oggero (Goss), Mark Grunlund (Advance Central Services director of manufacturing), Russ Kliese (Goss International), John Giustiniani, Dan Picco (Goss), and Bob Walters (Staten Island Advance commercial print)