Inserting on four Schur lines is a nightly routine for the ‘Bangkok Post’, frequently with multiple passes.
Production during a plant visit at the end of the Publish Asia conference was no exception, despite global attention to the ‘Wills and Kate’ nuptials that day: Business and a compact tabloid ‘Muse’ lifstyle section was being inserted into a sport section with the obligatory cover picture of Posh and Becks arriving at the Abbey. Later a quarter-web of woodfree brought the broadsheet main book to 16 pages while providing wedding watchers with a lasting souvenir.
With a daily circulation of 60,000 copies – plus 85,000 for the Thai-language ‘Post Today’ – the four-year-old plant takes it in its stride.
The 75,000 cph KBA Prisma press – with four towers and a double folder to produce an all-colour 32-page broadsheet – sits at the end of a presshall big enough to accommodate two more similar lines. President and chief operating officer Supakorn Vejjajiva tells me such capacity is unlikely to be needed... but it’s good to have the space.
“Contract work is hard to get and poorly paid, so we’ve usually finished for the day by about 2am,” he says.
Post does have the advantage of an unusual Jetweb plough folder which enables to it produce super-panorama gatefolds for itself and customers including Singapore Press Holdings’ ‘Straits Times’, but does relatively little outside work.
The 4/1 configuration of the press provides flexibility to increase products by two broadsheet pages... an argument no doubt put to the former Goss Community user by then Heidelberg chief executive Bernhard Schreier when he visited Bangkok during Publish Asia in 2002. Those were the days of Heidelberg’s declared intention to dominate the newspaper press market, when the 4/1 format of its Mainstream and web-width flexibility of movable folder formers were an innovation: Today, the KBA Prisma has both (the Bangkok press was the first so-equipped)... and what remains of Heidelberg’s newspaper portfolio is now part of Chinese-owned Goss International.
Peripheral equipment on the press includes Baldwin spray bars and blanket washers, Technotrans dampening recirculation, QuadTech cut and colour registration and EAE press controls.
The plant operates as a remote slave with pages handled by Pro-Image’s Newsway workflow to two Agfa Polaris platesetters and an offline Nela punch unit. PDFs are generated at the city office, where an Atex system is used for Thai business daily ‘Post Today’ and the same company’s (former Cybergraphic) systems for the English-language ‘Bangkok Post’.
Away from the city on partially-reclaimed land close to the international airport, the plant, with its aerodynamically-shaped roof, is also away from the worst of Bangkok’s traffic congestion.
There’s also a sense that the family interest pays off, and is reflected through the plant: Vejjajiva – who is young and joins the tour wearing a pair of orange trousers – is the son-in-law of the family which owns Post Publishing with Hong Kong’s ‘South China Morning Post’ and a local media group.
Never likely to attract the mass circulation of the Thai popular press, it’s nonetheless a healthy and respected player in an often difficult market.
Peter Coleman
