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Are daily newspapers printed offset?

This question is circulating in all press institutions in the world. Every publishing house wants to print its newspapers with offset printing, that elegant printing that shows all aspects of the image in complete clarity (which is how Life, Time, and Newsweek magazines are printed). But how do they achieve this printing, which takes longer to prepare and costs more in paper, ink, and engraving?

This is what experts are trying to overcome now to make offset printing within the reach of all journalistic institutions. There are many difficulties that must be overcome, the first of which is collecting with bullets: Can journalistic institutions dispense with all hot collecting machines - and replace them with the expensive photocopying device? The second is the process of printing images on transparent films instead of clichés. This process takes a long time and costs a lot of money. The third is the montage process, the method equivalent to packing in typescript printing. This process is carried out on a light board on which the images and text printed on film are mounted to form a complete unit of 4 or two pages. Fourth, he printed this painting on a sensitive zinc plate and then etched this zinc in an acidic liquid. This process takes longer than the process of pressing the pages on the “so and so” and pouring them onto the semicircular stereo pages.

All these steps must be completed within a period not exceeding 3 or 4 hours. The biggest problem occurs in the second edition, when late and important news arrives and requires returning one page to publish this news. In this case, all previous operations must be repeated, but not on one page, as is the case in Tipo printing, but on the entire plate, which may have two, four, or more pages on it.

Hence, we find that experts have many problems to which they are searching for solutions that will satisfy journalistic institutions. The last important problem is the speed of rotation of the offset printing press: It is known that the offset printing press is slower in its rotation than the tipo printing press. They are now trying to increase this speed to reach a speed at least equivalent to the speed of the Tipo printing press.

What is happening today is that some newspapers are actually printed offset. These newspapers have a circulation range between 15,000 and 150,000, and they use several printing units: they are printed in color only once a week. All of these newspapers are regional and published in small cities where they have no competition. They can be published at any time they wish, without others preceded them in publication.

But experts insist that the future of daily journalism depends on print. Therefore, today they are trying to shorten some of these stages and reduce costs as much as possible. They want to cancel the stages of montage, printing, and engraving, which are the most important stages of offset printing. They want to achieve a way in which they can send images, along with the text of speech, via an electronic television device directly to a rotating printing cylinder, and then engrave them with a laser beam in a way that does not take many offset seconds:

The Linotype company came up with a new method to dispense with the montage stage. This method was called (the marriage of convenience between lead combining and the offset printing press) because it eliminated the stage of printing lead lines on white paper, then photographing the pages on films, and then the montage process. These operations used to take several hours, but now they take 15 minutes, in addition to reducing expenses.

The new device manufactured by this company is called (Direct Image), and it works in the following way: After the page is packed, it is printed on a thin zinc plate with special ink. Thus, the entire page - with the text engraved in lead and its images engraved on zinc with a 110-degree grid - is transferred onto the thin zinc plate. Then the plate is transferred to the oven of the device and remains inside it under a certain temperature for seven minutes until the ink sticks to the zinc. Then a layer of acids is placed on the board to turn it into a sensitive board in two minutes. After that, the plate is placed on a round cylinder and the letters that emerged during printing are pressed to re-emerge on the other side of the plate. This process takes six minutes. The plate is then sent directly to the offset press, and all these steps do not take more than 15 minutes. This plate can print about 70,000 copies before it is replaced.

Other experts confirm that offset printing is not as expensive as some people think, nor as slow as they say. Until the method of engraving with a fast laser beam was reached, they conducted studies in America and Japan - for the first time - on the difference in speed and cost between two newspapers, one printed with offset and the other printed with typograph.

Malcolm Graham, one of the experts in printing in America, says: The costs of equipment and production of a limited-sized evening newspaper with photocopiers and offset plates are almost the same as the costs of printing with ordinary letters. There is no doubt that the type of offset printing is much superior to letterpress printing, but the speed of production is slightly slower. These are the conclusions of Malcolm Graham after ten months he spent in the production of Shrew Bashir Star in Kitley, which averages a little less than 24 thousand copies sold daily. Comparing the virtues of the two methods used production costs and timing in Keatley with similar ones recorded in Delverhampton, where expresses are printed in letters.

Although the daily circulation of the Express (Tipo) newspaper is ten times that of Shiro Bashayer Star (Offset), the size of its regular issues is double. Shar and Bashayer Star, the page area of ​​the two newspapers is the same. Expenditures in the two centers were calculated over a period of four weeks (from July 19 to August 14, 1965).

Correctly comparing expenses between two units that differ to such a large extent in their size is difficult. For example, when the expenses for one painting are calculated, it becomes clear that they are less in a house that produces 300 paintings per day than in another house that produces only 50 paintings per day.

A steady reduction was achieved in the offset press as workers' experience increased and production methods improved. They were also able to find alternative materials that perform a better job than the materials they used in the beginning and are less expensive. The costs of producing 1,000 pages of wide offset paper, including 7 pages in color on average, indicate a saving of 30 percent in a hall. The letters are compared to the expenses of the Tipo printing press. Plate production was 10 percent higher, machine shop expenses were 20 percent higher, and total production expenses were 2 percent higher than in the Tipo printing press. To compare the speed of production in each of the two houses, they took the average time required to collect late news on a six-inch column and place it in the newspaper, and what it takes to produce plates for the offset press and install them in the press to start its operation. The time required for this offset process increased by 10 times that of the additional time required to make the plate.

The printing process was slower in the offset press, with production reaching 24 thousand copies per hour compared to 29 thousand copies per hour in the other printing press.

The expenses of the hall for machines that use offset increase because the damage increases by 2 percent, and because the ink is much more expensive even though it is used in a smaller quantity.

The harm in combining by photography was that the errors in the photocopying units could not be identified by the rehearsal proofreaders because they had already corrected the copies produced by the perforating machines. Correcting the lines takes a longer time in the photocopying method. The line is first placed on the perforating device, then the tape is entered into a photocopying unit and then acidified before being pasted onto the page. .

On the other hand, negative images can be scanned, enlarged or reduced, and placed on the page faster than letterpress printing. Although the main expenditures for supplying the offset equipment are comparable to a similar unit using letterpress printing, the lifespan of the machines is not known and hence the depreciation in use is not mentioned in the expenses of either newspaper.

The space required for the two operations was approximately the same, and the costs of constructing the building were equal for either unit. They believe that the possibilities of reducing expenses and increasing speed in production are greater in offset than in typography. They expect that after a period of five years or less, offset printing will increase compared to what it is now. It is clear that printing, especially half-ton, is much better in offset, and there is no doubt that this is an important factor that helps increase sales by 25 percent after less than six years. Months after publication, and for technical reasons they did not use colors until the last few months. These comparisons led to the following conclusions:

1 - The main expenses for constructing the building and supplying it with photocopying machines and an offset printing press to produce between 20,000 and 50,000 copies of a daily newspaper with a length of 32 pages are 22 percent more than the expenses of producing a similar newspaper produced, of course, in letters, but without the availability of colors. If these colors are added to the expenses of letterpress printing, the difference will disappear.

2- The cost of printing a thousand pages is almost the same.

3 - The time taken for production using the offset method is longer, but it does not reach the extent that would cause serious harm, provided that there is no competition with another newspaper in the same region.

4- The highest quality offset printing and facilitating the printing of good colors at low expenses is a great advantage.

This is the result of a comparison between two regional American newspapers. As for Japan, the Greater Asahi newspaper published a report - based on the experiments it conducted and its experience - in which it compared the costs of offset printing (which it said was the printing of the future) and typograph printing, with which it prints its newspapers. Asahi newspaper is printed in 6 large printing presses. There are 6 different countries in Japan, including five printing presses that print using the typographic method and one that prints using the offset method.

Asahi conducted this study on the basis of printing 200,000 copies (each copy of 16 pages) using these two types of printing.

The maximum speed of the Tipo machine was 95,000 copies per hour, which decreased to 60,000 due to the installation of plates and tearing of paper, while the maximum speed of the offset machine reached 75,000 copies per hour, which decreased to 50,000 for the same reasons.

The costs of 200,000 copies for offset printing amounted to $3,884, and the costs for the same quantity in tipo printing amounted to $3,542, with a slight difference of $342, which represents 10%.

We find from this research that the cost differences are not as exorbitant as we had imagined, but the problem lies in speed. When the offset speed reaches the same level as the speed of the tipo, most press institutions will switch to printing their newspapers with offset.

The first experiment took place in London at the beginning of this year (1968) to hybridize an offset printing press and a Tipo printing press. The two printing presses ran together at a single speed of 70,000 copies per hour. This enabled them to print one hybrid newspaper: some pages in offset and others in Tipo.

One of the experts said during a special study on offset held in London that the electronic mind in offset printing will not only supervise the pictorial collection process, but it will become a storehouse of articles, titles, and images, through the television LED inside the mind, and through the use of the pen. This pen will combine the function of the editor with the function of the compiler.