And there’s a recurring criticism that readers put up with less colour content and poorer quality standards than their Sydney and Melbourne contemporaries as a result of the lack of competition.
Now the presses which were the subject of a historic 1987 order covering four Australian sites and the Wapping, London, offset presses News has now scrapped, are to be given another ten or 15 years’ life.
While News installed new manroland Geoman presses to replace Sydney presses which were part of the same order, those at the Brisbane site in Murarrie – originally designed to print only spot colour on one side of the web and full colour on the other – are to be refurbished.
The maker’s successor, manroland Web Systems was given the order to refurbish the four 1990s Newsman 40 presses last week.
They will gain some elements of the press maker’s autoprint functionality. This includes inline control systems, production planning, QuickStart start-up automation, monitoring and reporting, and the new Printnetwork Mobile controls.
The order was announced at a press conference at the WAN-Ifra World Publishing Expo in Frankfurt, Germany, today.