More color and greater flexibility are key drivers behind investment
Enhanced press expected to deliver more advertising revenue
 
Gotlands Förenade Tidningstryckerier located in Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland has ordered three single-width Community four-high towers from Goss International. The investment involves an overall upgrade to provide quality and operational improvements, including remote control capabilities.
 
Part of the Pressgrannar Group of newspaper printers, which in turn belongs to Nya Tidens Media (NTM), Gotlands Förenade Tidningstryckerier (Gotlands) currently operates a Community press comprising four four-high towers and four mono units with 560mm cut-off. The existing 2x1 press was originally installed in the early 1980s. Extensions added ten years ago provide capacity to print a total of 64 tabloid pages, with 32 in full color. The addition of the three new towers will enable the press line to produce a further 24 full-color pages to meet demand from advertisers. Gotlands has also specified automatic register and cut-off controls as well as additional automated features to ensure the ability to match the highest coldset quality of all the Group titles.
 
According to Peter Dahlén, project manager of Gotlands, although the company operates on a small island with around 58,000 inhabitants, the press extension will offer significant growth potential. "The pressure from advertisers for more color in newspapers has grown relentlessly over recent years and, without a doubt, we will sell more pages of advertising with the greater capacity for full-color pages," he comments. "Sweden is a newspaper-reading nation, so we also experience large peaks in demand over holiday periods. As we are running at capacity currently, we're not in a position to capitalize on these opportunities …but we soon will be."
 
Gotlands prints the two key titles for the island, Gotlands Allehanda and Gotlands Tidningar, both produced six days per week in print runs of around 10,000 copies each. With the new longer press line in production, the company also anticipates printing additional evening tabloid products during summer months.
 
"The challenge for us is to maintain profitability, in view of decreasing circulations, while improving our ability to be highly flexible in terms of format, sectioning and post-press services," comments Dahlén. "The solution as we see it is to enhance automation, alongside the additional color and web-handling capacity, ensuring that we run as efficiently as possible for even the shortest runs. We've worked well with Goss in the past on challenging projects; we feel confident we have the right partner again for the next mission."