New face, new pace

The Advertiser, launched on December 9, 1853, and published daily since April 7, 1856, was the second newspaper produced for the Victorian goldfields, but the first printed in Sandhurst (which was renamed Bendigo in 1891). Angus Mackay bought the paper in May 1855 and his family owned it until 1918. In 1856 the Advertiser had enjoyed “so large a circulation” as to compel it, in an era of hand-setting and manually-operated presses, to use machinery in getting out the paper. F.B. Franklyn and Co. supplied the Advertiser with a single-cylinder Desideratum capable of printing 1,000 impressions an hour. Competition compelled the Mackays to update their technology regularly. When they installed a new Wharfedale two-feeder press in 1873, the pressmen found the register “so perfect” that they were confident it could be safely used “for printing colours”. The Advertiser announced to its readers on October 28, 1873, that it appeared that morning “under a new face, and in enlarged form”. Why? To keep pace with the demands of a largely increased circulation and with the pressure on the space devoted to advertising, owner-editor Angus Mackay wrote. “And to keep pace with the competition,” he should have added. The Advertiser was one of the four dailies published in Sandhurst at the time: Advertiser and Independent, am; and Evening Star and Evening News, pm. The Mackays boasted that their Wharfedale was essentially a rapid news printing machine constructed so solidly that it would run “at a high rate of speed-up to 4,000 an hour-with perfect safety and without perceptible vibration”. The movements were “almost noiseless”. The machine was fitted “with a contrivance by which the tedious work of hand-flying is entirely dispensed with, thus saving the labour of two pair of hands”. The new press and boiler were erected in a separate part of the premises from the old press so that, in an emergency, the old press could be used. Twenty years later, the Mackays needed a more advanced press. They had already added a single-feeder machine, as the back-up machine, and a folder, which had been in constant use, but they needed a press that would print the paper on both sides and fold each copy faster than the Wharfedale two-feeder and the folder could. Angus Mackay jun. visited England in 1892 and inspected a wide variety of presses. He was so impressed by a revolutionary “Lancashire” machine that he ordered the construction of another, only the second in existence when installed at Bendigo in 1893. The Lancashire was designed to meet the requirements of newspapers whose circulation was “beyond the powers of the Wharfedale machines, but not sufficiently large to justify the costly process of stereotyping”. Several years earlier machines had been invented for “printing newspapers from a continuous web of paper, instead of from separate sheets, but these were all rotary machines”. The pages of the newspaper to be printed had to be stereotyped, and the plates curved so as to fit a cylinder from which the impressions were taken upon the paper. The Advertiser said stereotyping was “too costly and troublesome” for a newspaper with a circulation between 5,000 and 15,000 (its own “stated” circulation was 12,000 in 1892). The Lancashire filled the need for a machine that printed on a flat surface from a continuous web of paper. The patent had been taken out in 1884, but difficulties in “obtaining uniformity of motion between the surface of the type and the paper when receiving the impression” had been overcome only in the past year. The Advertiser gave a detailed description of the printing process, and invited subscribers to see the machine in action between 10.30am and 11.30am on August 21, 1893, the day the new press produced the paper for the first time. Seventy years later-on February 13, 1963-Flora Mackay, daughter of Angus Mackay jun., pressed a button to activate the Advertiser’s latest press, installed because the newspaper’s plant and building had been destroyed by fire seven months earlier. The “new” press was actually half of an “old” (1926) Hoe press. The Advertiser initially bought three units of the eight units, but added a fourth later. At its peak, the Bendigo press could print 40,000 copies an hour, ten times the capacity of the 1873 press. Even though the 1873 press hardly vibrated and was “almost noiseless”, the Hoe installed 90 years later led an Advertiser reporter to write that each publication night “the ground moved”. It began sometime after midnight, building from a low frequency rumble into a thundering vibration. “It is an emotional and exciting time for the entire paper-the old bugger of a press has been fired up again.” The Hoe was built on three levels inside the Advertiser building, and was “fed daily on a diet of up to five tonnes of paper, 40 litres of sludgy ink and untold amounts of pain, sweat and effort by its operators”. When the Hoe was replaced in 1993 by a Goss Community web offset press, the paper maintained its broadsheet format, although it introduced a colour masthead panel in 1996. On June 29, 1998, the Advertiser changed its format to tabloid as dwindling circulations forced a rethink among the few remaining broadsheet regional dailies. Owners have the final say in what technology is used. The Herald & Weekly Times Ltd (part of News Ltd since 1987) owned the paper from 1963-90, and INL (New Zealand, with News holding the dominant interest) from 1990-2002. Rural Press Ltd (now part of Fairfax Media) has owned it since 2002. Since February 14, 2005, the Advertiser has no longer been printed in Bendigo. Fifteen Bendigo production employees lost their jobs when Rural Press’s new Ballarat print centre took over the printing of Bendigo’s 152-year-old newspaper. The bottom line was that it did not make sense for Rural Press to spend millions to upgrade the Bendigo press when it had just outlaid $32 million on a state-of-the-art print centre at Ballarat, little more than an hour away by road. In the final few months of 2009, printing of the weekday edition of the Advertiser was shifted to the Age site at Tullamarine. It takes about 50 minutes to print the weekday edition, which has an average print run of 13,500. The Saturday edition is still printed at Ballarat. Production of the Advertiser has indeed become “noiseless” for Bendigonians.