With ongoing interest in the ubiquitous Urbanite press – a 28-tower version of which is currently being installed for Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post – we couldn’t resist bringing you this picture.

Thanks presumably to the wonders of artificial intelligence, it shows what purports to be the classic Goss single-width, two-around newspaper press… but clearly isn’t. The technically-improbable (and impossible) illustrations look more like sheetfed than web, for a start.

We’ve taken it from a website which clearly isn’t what it claims to be either, at www.gossus.com (visit it at your own risk).

The site presents as that of a rebuild & service contractor for Community, Urbanite, M-600, Sunday and Uniliner presses, and expands the myth by continuing to what it calls “commercial and digital printers”. Note the fictitious machine with the dedicated lines for cyan, yellow, magenta and black on the home page.

Scroll down and you’ll learn about a “Goss Community Press” that is equally fictitious – although text descriptions are curiously close to reality – and continue to “Urbanite daily offset press” (top), “M-600”, “Sunday & Uniliner Press Programs”.

Finally the site offers that if you “don't see your press, we probably still support it. If you operate a Goss press not listed here, submit your nameplate data and an engineer will attach the relevant service options,” it says.

We’re guessing that all of this is some form of chatbot indigestion that has gone live regardless of the confusion it might cause.

But we look forward to hearing the story…!

If you’re confused, take it from us that these days, Goss, which was established in the US in 1885, is a brand of German-headquartered manroland Goss Web Systems, with its official website at www.manrolandgoss.com/en

Peter Coleman