Princeton, NJ – 1st February 2006 -- Post-Newsweek Media, Inc., based in Maryland and owned by The Washington Post Company, is in the process of installing ProImage’s NewsWay digital workflow solution. NewsWay will manage workflow from the offices of two of Post-Newsweek’s Media’s newspaper brands -- Southern Maryland Newspapers in Waldorf, Md., and The Gazette in Gaithersburg, Md. -- to its production offices at Comprint Printing in a second Gaithersburg location. Newsway is due to come on stream this summer. “We selected NewsWay for several reasons, including its distributed processing architecture that provides us with enormous scalability as well as back-up redundancy, its ability to provide us with customized workflows, and because it is proven browser-based technology,” said Shane Butcher, director of technology, Post-Newsweek Media. “Because we produce weekly newspapers serving more than 50 communities, various bi-weeklies and about 100 commercial jobs each week, a high degree of flexibility is essential. NewsWay will take most of the manual handling away. It also allows us the flexibility to select our CtP solution later. In addition, and valuably, ProImage allows the use of as many browser clients as we wish - without additional cost.” "No two customers are the same,” said Rick Shafranek, ProImage America vice president of sales. “For Post-Newsweek Media, we will configure several different workflow solutions, each designed for the originators’ different products, workflow and print requirements. We are grateful that ProImage has been selected as Post-Newsweek’s Media’s workflow technology partner, and that the advantages of our leading-edge technology have been again recognized.” NewsWay will integrate all existing pre-press systems, including Mactive’s advertising system, OneVision’s SpeedFlow pre-flighting module, Xitron’s Harelquin RIPs, Black Magic color proofers and, until new CtP equipment is installed at the new Gaithersburg printing plant, Agfa Avantra filmsetters. “NewsWay is the first piece, the foundation on which a completely automated solution that will manage workflow from advertising front-end through to the Mitsubishi press control system is based,” said Post-Newsweek Media’s Butcher. “The time and cost savings it will provide will be significant.” Southern Maryland Newspapers, The Gazette and Comprint Printing are all under the umbrella of the Community Newspaper Group, a division of Post-Newsweek Media. In addition to printing the Group’s own products (Community Newspaper Group publications have a combined circulation of more than one million) Comprint Printing, one of the largest commercial web printers in Washington, D.C., also prints newspapers and guides for 12 United States military bases throughout the greater Washington, D.C., area. NewsWay will therefore manage multiple workflows for a large number of differing pages and impositions. When Comprint Printing unveils its new Mitsubishi Diamondstar press in the United States in a new building in Laurel, Md. next year, NewsWay will be part of the solution. The NewsWay software will automatically impose pages based on the edition plans, hold paired pages in an approval queue, provide soft proofs as well as drive the hardcopy proofers, and after approval, load balance the RIPs, burn page furniture onto the plates, and output to the filmsetters. NewsWay will also send low resolution PDFs to an electronic archiving system, providing one sophisticated page automation and management environment. Multiple automated workflows: The solution being implemented for Post Newsweek Media, as well as for other daily newspapers, involves NewsWay receiving PostScript and multi-page pdf files from the front-end systems and sending them to two folders; one high resolution for production and the other low resolution for archiving. NewsWay will then load balance the RIPs, send color pages to the hard-copy proofers, automatically impose pages based on the edition plan, and hold the paired pages in an approval queue. After approval (both soft and hard copy proofs are created) NewsWay will move the files for output to the Avantra's filmsetters which, to maximize throughput, it also load balances. It then sends the low-resolution pdfs for archiving. The Waldorf facility will use the NewsWay system installed in Gaithersburg remotely, but until new CtP equipment is installed in the new building in Laurel, it will output to its own Avantra filmsetters. Post Newsweek-Media’s military products will use a similar workflow, except that NewsWay will send a RIPped tiff file outside the firewall to a remote soft proofing server so that in order to save time, potential errors and cost, customers can soft proof and approve pages online. Once they are approved, pages will be paired and output. Comprint Printing also has to deal with commercial products that arrive as single page pdfs or as two-up pairs. These will be treated as broadsheets and pairs rotated to make four-ups before being output on the Avantras.