The Gazette has moved into the 2020s with a new Digital Press print system. As you may have noticed, the print is sharper, and the pictures are frankly magazine quality. Where the old system used InkJet (which sprays ink on the paper in near-microscopic amounts,) the new system uses Laser Printer/Copier technology to offer amazing prints that don’t suffer from ghosting and other issues…
Additionally, the new system is about 10x faster than the old one. With the old system, we were pretty well limited to no more than 500 papers a day printing capacity. We would work 18-20 hour days to achieve that number. Now, we can work a typical day, and a mid-shift phone call doesn’t throw us into overtime. In 8 hours, we can easily do 2000+ papers per day; in a crunch, we can move up to about 4000-5000 per day.
Opening up the future
This should hold us until springtime when we hope to get a Great Falls office and print center opened up. At that point, we’ll add additional units. The system is modular, so we can quickly add print units, folders, staplers, and binding equipment as we grow. This will help reduce waste and increase the flexibility of our system.
Part of that flexibility is about to appear. Because of the much more automated system, we can make papers for our business partners. Instead of a generic promotional paper, it will have that partner’s name on the cover. As we phase out the free promotional papers, this will help our business partners who want to have papers for their clients and get credit for providing them. The new system allows better control of batches, and we can literally make a custom front page for each partner. All of this and still allow them to have a great price!
Another aspect of the system is that by allowing higher print rates and less wastage, we can start looking at expanding paper content again. This means more stories and increased content for you, our loyal readers!
Author: Andy Anderson
Andy is publisher of Foxys Publishing Co, as well as pressman, ad sales, distribution and sometime janitor. He occasionally makes a wild attempt at writing but quite often is seen running around our offices trying to "Get 39 million things done today..."
