Last Word in Automation

While New York newspapers struggle with assorted unions for the right to automate in bits and pieces, a new British daily went into operation last week with ultramodern, automatic, labor-and-time-saving techniques in every production area. Started by Lord Thomson of Fleet, 71, who owns 125 newspapers and 105 magazines in Britain, Ireland, Canada, the U.S. and Africa, the Evening Post of Reading makes use of equipment that has been on the market for a few years: computerized type-fitting, phototypesetting and offset printing. But never before has it all been assembled in one newspaper printing plant. In the U.S., the cost of such automation has inhibited most publishers, and even partial automation is often bucked by printers and others fearful of losing jobs. In Britain, publishers and printers have generally managed to work out agreements for splitting savings from automation, and printing jobs are eliminated only through attrition.

No More Roaring Metal. The Reading plant, says Roy Thompson, is a "cross between a laboratory and a hospital. No more of that hot, roaring metal. The typesetters wear ordinary clothes to work and don't spatter themselves with oil." The copy desk is just a few yards from twelve keyboard machines on which former linotypists type copy into the same sort of computer that some New York newspapers have vainly tried to install. The computer hyphenates and justifies lines to form even newspaper columns, thus eliminating one of the printers' biggest jobs.

Pouring out of the computer at 600 words per minute, the justified tape is passed into three Photon machines. Controlled by the holes in the tape, light passes through a whirling glass disk on which the alphabet is printed; letters are automatically selected and words recorded on photographic paper.

These words in columns of type are then arranged into pages which are photographically printed onto thin metal plates with chemically treated surfaces. The plates are put on the presses, and the inked impressions transferred to a roller and then to paper. This "offset" printing is cheaper than the usual letterpress printing, which employs heavy, molded metal plates. But at the moment, offset plates are practicable only for papers with a fairly short press run.

Ringing London. Aside from automation, the Evening Post of Reading boasts other distinctions. It is one of a bare handful of provincial evening papers to be started in Britain in the last three decades. Moreover, it is published in a town that is only 36 miles from London, where there are twelve big dailies. Competitors have their doubts that the experiment will succeed. But Lord Thomson of Fleet has planned with care, and he is confident enough to predict that he will some day be publishing eight new suburban dailies in towns ringing London.

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