Saturday, Sep 13, 2003
Saturday, Sep 13, 2003 |
| Technology | ||||
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Technology
The NICA content management system
Effective use of contemporary technology has been a prominent feature in The Hindu during its growth from selling a handful of copies at birth to an average of over 900000 copies today. In a vast country like India where the overwhelming proportion of the population lives in the countryside, the intertwined problems of time and distance are crucial for a newspaper seeking greater circulation and penetration. The four southern states - Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala - that The Hindu was seeking to cover have a geographical area of more than 650000 square kilometres (roughly the area of France and Austria put together). With a single printing centre in Chennai (then Madras), editions had to be printed in the evening to be sent by overnight trains to distant centres for delivery the next day. While other newspapers chose to set up printing plants in different regions, The Hindu found its own unique solution to the problem. After an experimental period of chartering aircraft for purposes of distribution, The Hindu, in 1963 became the first newspaper in India to acquire and operate its own aircraft for carrying copies to readers in different parts of southern India. The air services touched Bangalore, Coimbatore, Cochin (now Kochi), Hyderabad, Madurai, Tiruchi, Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) and Vijayawada. The innovation - judged to be daring and risky by some and mad by others - was a success. The phenomenon of the "provincial" reader being 24 hours or more behind the news was ended and the paper was able to meet competition on level terms. The air services were by no means an easy operation. They were expensive, at times hazardous, especially in turbulent monsoon weather. In the event, a better way was found. That was facsimile transmission, another "first" in India for The Hindu. In July 1969, the first facsimile link using a telephone group channel was established with Coimbatore. The printing press set up there took care of most of Kerala and parts of Tamil Nadu. The second link was with Bangalore, in March 1970, covering the whole of Karnataka and some parts of Andhra Pradesh. The facsimile equipment was made by Litton Industries of the US. Both transmitters and receivers were drum type analogue machines based on valve electronic circuits. Transmission of a broadsheet page took nine minutes. What was transmitted was a page proof on glazed newsprint. Photocomposition (introduced in 1980) brought about a change in the type of original to be transmitted - from a proof to a paste-up. At the receiving end, zinc relief plates were made using the Dow etch process. The plates were fixed to saddles with double-sided adhesive tape and mounted on the press. Hyderabad, in mid-1976, became the third facsimile centre. The choice fell on Muirhead equipment that was also analogue and drum. Madurai was the fourth, in 1978, the paper's Centenary year.
Time reduced
In June 1984, the facsimile equipment was updated with the acquisition of a digital laser flatbed scanner and LED drum recorders from Matsushita Graphic Communications Systems of Japan. The time taken to transmit a broadsheet page (black and white) was reduced to between two and four minutes using a communication bandwidth of 144 Kbps. An edition in the national capital, New Delhi was The Hindu's next major technical step forward. It was felt that a terrestrial link would be too risky over this distance of nearly 1800 km from Chennai. So, in September 1986, the link with the Indian communications satellite INSAT 1-B was established via the earth stations of the DOT. The facsimile receivers were located in the heart of New Delhi and the film positives were sent by car to the contract printing site about 25 km away. In 1995, the paper moved into its own printing premises in Wazirpur where, today, both page reception and printing are done. For many years till the middle and late 1970s, problems of availability of newsprint, supplies of which were controlled by the Government, had kept average page levels very low. With some improvement in availability of newsprint and the potential of facsimile transmission, possibilities for regional editions and higher page levels were opened up. However, in the task of setting up larger volumes to deadline and of upgrading quality, hot metal composing was found wanting. And so, in May 1980, the battery of Linotype, Intertype and Ludlow machines which first came to The Hindu in the 1920s was replaced by a computer-aided photocomposing system from Helprint, Finland. The Hindu became the first mainline daily in India to introduce photocomposing at one stroke. The first Monotype Lasercomp imagesetters to come into India were installed as part of the system. With the commencement of the Delhi edition, the news input from Delhi went up substantially and with it the pressure on the teleprinter/telex system. In November 1986, The Hindu started using the Packet Switched Data Network (PSTN) facility offered by the DOT to enable journalists to key in copy in Delhi and transmit it directly into the photocomposing system. This made possible the extension of deadlines and saved another keyboard operation in Chennai. In August 1987, composing room technology was updated with the introduction of a PC-based system (Mentor) from GB Techniques of the UK, driving a Monotype Lasercomp Express. The Helprint front end could still be used. Around the end of 1990, The Hindu started looking for page composition systems that could eliminate cut and paste and achieve computer-to-full page film. This would mean a complete digital workflow, including digitisation of advertisement material. A pagination system based on Sun Sparc servers from CCI, Denmark was installed in 1993, which had scanners from Eskofot (Eskofot 2540) on the input side and imagesetters from Linotype (Linotronic 560) on the output side. This also signalled the end of the facsimile system and the beginning of remote typesetting (imagesetting).
Dainippon Screen SG-808 scanner
All remote sites had OPI servers. The page components would be automatically routed there (via 2 x 64 Kbps digital links) as soon as they were assigned to a page. This would happen throughout the day. When pagination was completed, the page geometry and the text would be transmitted in the super EPS format. By mid-2002 The Hindu had migrated from the CCI release 7 system to the CCI NewsDesk, a contemporary, fully editorial-based newspaper production system. The NewsDesk is built around a central Oracle database running on Sun Enterprise 4500 servers and offers a production workflow that is far more flexible and versatile than the old system. A significant change is the major part of the work of building the pages is done by editors sitting at computer terminals rather than by the production staff. The Hindu is now better placed to handle the large numbers of regional pages that have to be produced for the different print sites. The remote sites receive PDF files for imagesetting. All sites are connected to Chennai via 2Mbps digital links. The first steps towards a computer-to-plate (CTP) workflow (as distinguished from computer-to-film imagesetting) have been taken with the installation of an Agfa Polaris CTP device in Chennai in June 2003.
Content repository
Also implemented was a digital asset management system from IBM, the NICA (Networked Interactive Content Access). The NICA system is tightly integrated with the CCI NewsDesk and serves as the content repository. The Hindu's commitment to colour goes back a long way. It was in 1940 that the paper first ran letterpress colour in advertisements on the front page. The single-width Duplex presses that were in operation in Chennai made way for the double-width Wifag 60 machines in 1961. The Duplex presses were put back in service, but in the facsimile plants at Coimbatore and Bangalore. Offset colour in The Hindu had to wait till the mid-1970s. The installation of the first of the offset presses in Hyderabad in 1976 gave the newspaper the opportunity to show advertisers the tremendous pull of quality colour. In course of time, all remote printing sites converted to offset printing, the machines being Super Gazette presses from Creusot-Loire, France. Colour separations were being done by outside processing houses till March 1983 when a dot generating colour scanner was installed. The Dainippon Screen SG808 gave the paper's colour work a really sharp edge. Newer and more versatile scanners such as Screen's 1045 and Cezanne, and the ICG 360 have helped maintain the quality of colour work. The Hindu had always paid great attention to sports coverage. Telephoto camera shots - something unique - began appearing in the sports pages of The Hindu as early as the 1930s. Till it was closed down in 1968, the most popular sports magazine of the times was the weekly, Sport & Pastime, published by The Hindu. In 1978 The Sportstar, a sports weekly was launched. It was printed on the Gazette in Hyderabad, first on offset printing paper (map litho) and then on glazed newsprint. It was not easy to print coldset on the smooth surface of glazed newsprint, but for the time being that had to suffice. Heatset printing made its debut at The Hindu in June 1983 in the form of the Komori System 35 (speed, 36000 copies per hour) from Japan. Immediately the potential of the colour scanner could be fully exploited - high quality work on coated stock was possible. The Sportstar began carrying sections printed on coated paper and glazed newsprint. Both the image and circulation of the weekly received a boost from improved production quality. The availability of quality production capacity made possible the launch of another magazine in 1984 - Frontline, a fortnightly.
More printing sites
The Hindu continued to expand by adding to the number of remote printing sites: Vishakapatnam started printing on May 10, 1990, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) on March 23, 1995, Kochi on September 10, 2000, Vijayawada on December 13, 2001, and Mangalore on June 21, 2002. Tiruchi is next. In mid-1990, heatset capacity was expanded with the installation of a 2-web (one 4-colour and one mono-colour) press from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan (speed 45000 copies per hour). Investments in printing presses have been a constant feature in The Hindu. Although some of the Super Gazettes are still in operation, the bulk of the work at the remote sites is now being done by the Indian-made Newsline 45 presses from Manugraph Industries. All remote sites print colour every night, and in addition several colour sections that are issued with the paper on different days of the week. Printing of the newspaper at the headquarters in Chennai was done by letterpress till 1985. When phototypesetting was introduced in 1980, The Hindu switched to photopolymer plates (the production stages being: bromide paste-ups to film negative to photopolymer plate). These plates had to be mounted on metal saddles using double-sided adhesive tape. In 1985, the double-width Visa offset press from Creusot-Loire, France replaced the Wifag 60 letterpress machines in Chennai. A 10-cylinder satellite unit helped enhance the colour capacity of The Hindu. However the early years of the 1990s saw a spurt in advertising demand and consequently page levels had to be increased. A Newsline 45 pressline was installed in Chennai to help achieve this.
The Ferag Rollpack
In the second half of 1997 two completely new press lines went into operation in Chennai. Built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan and christened "Asia-M", each press line had 4 reel stands, 1 4-hi tower, 3 B-B units, hot air dryer and chiller, and 1 double rotary folder, capable of printing a maximum of 32 pages (with 8 pages in 4-colour) straight and 64 pages (with 16 pages in 4-colour) collect. The double-width dryer and chiller are used not only for day-time printing but at night too: all the colour printing on the Asia-M is done heatset. The Hindu is one among just a handful of newspapers in the world (and perhaps the only one in India) in which the main section is printed using a heatset-coldset combination. Another feature of production operations in Chennai is the use of the Ferag Rollpack system in the mailroom. This device is a counter-stacker, bundler and wrapper all rolled into one: it produces rolls of newspapers (held by plastic cling film) instead of the coventional rectangular bundles. The Hindu re-introduced colour in the main section of the newspaper in the Chennai edition in November 1999. The feature was extended in stages to the remote sites, for which add-on 3-c or 4-hi units from Manugraph were acquired. The task of maintaining consistent and predictable quality at several printing locations is by no means easy. The incorporation of colour bars (with the gray balance elements) has given the press operators an easy-to-use control tool. Upstream in the production flow, fundamentals such as calibration of imagsetters, checking dot percentages on film, ensuring the correct plate exposure, etc., are still given serious attention. It was not only colour reproduction that went digital in the 1980s. Scanners, such as the Scanica SF222 were used for black and white work. The Hindu was also among the earliest newspapers to provide its travelling photographers with picture transmitters - analogue devices which scanned black and white bromide prints and transmitted the data over a telephone line to the paper's headquarters. Today, virtually all images originate in colour, whether they be from the paper's own army of photographers, or from picture services such as AP and Reuters. Pictures from AP and Reuters are received via roof top dish antennas and routed to the NICA. Those belonging to the Internet generation will find it hard to understand how difficult it was for newspapers not so long ago to exploit the technology of the day. The hurdles - in respect of both equipment and materials - were predominantly non-technical: cost (made more burdensome by high import duties) and inaccessibility (due to licensing controls). Despite such constraints The Hindu has consistently tried to be technologically up-to-date. All these changes underline the fact that the need for updating technology never went out of the focus of those entrusted with the daily running of the paper. And The Hindu's staff have shown time and again a remarkable capacity to put technology to productive use. (The author is a Director of Kasturi and Sons Ltd.)
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