Like Johnson, Bailey is another former hot-metal compositor who has made it to the top of newspaper technical management. “Comps rule,” says Johnson with a smile.
Bailey – who has strong family links with News daily the Hobart ‘Mercury’ – worked with Johnson on the project to build a new printing plant opened there last year. His father and three uncles worked had editorial roles at the paper and cousin Gary Bailey is the newspaper’s editor. He joined the company in 1976 as an apprentice compositor, when hot-metal linecasters were driven by paper tape, and worked up through the business as prepress and then production and IT manager.
Johnson, too, had news ink in his veins, his father and grandfather having been lithographic artists, and his brother and several uncles were already in print when he joined the industry in 1957 starting as a copy boy at the ‘new’ Fairfax complex in Broadway.
Bailey (50) takes the new role of deputy national production director, working – as Johnson has – alongside George Calvi. He will be closely involved in the newly-announced project to replace the elderly manroland Uniman 2/2 press at the ‘Northern Territory News’ with a new KBA press which replicates in many respects, that installed in Hobart.
For Johnson, the Darwin project is further testament – if any were needed – to the service and experience he has brought to News Limited over 47 years. He oversaw the installation of a Goss Community press there in 1977, along with an ambitious conversion from hot-metal to photocomposition – and saw it replaced with the Uniman in 1984.
“That was our first dealings with manroland, and the relationship led to the huge order News placed for the colour presses we installed in Australia and the UK from the late 1980s,” he says.
“Dirk Kloeckner (of then agents Craven Print & Pack) called me to ask if they could help when Goss couldn’t supply a new press in time.”
Tributes flowed when Johnson’s retirement was announced last week: Calvi describes him as a “publishing icon” widely regarded as the father of News’ modern day production operations, and says many of his ideas, designs and workflow concepts in metro press sites have become the benchmark for the world.
News Limited chairman and chief executive officer John Hartigan says it is impossible to quantify the contribution Johnson has made, “not only to production here at News, but to the newspaper publishing industry worldwide.
"We shall miss him in every respect – as a master in his field, a trusted colleague and a friend. We wish him a healthy and happy retirement – he deserves it, and he's certainly earned it."
Rupert Murdoch apart, Barry Johnson is the last member of the team which worked on the first edition of ‘The Australian’ in Canberra in 1964. He moved to Sydney with production of the national newspaper, and was closely involved with News’ evolution from computerised typesetting to photocomposition, before overseeing the introduction of colour web-offset presses throughout the group.
In the biggest order for newspaper presses ever, News committed to high-speed manroland Newsman double-width presses for greenfield print sites in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, as well as for a comprehensive upgrade of its Wapping plant in east London.
The new presses brought much greater colour capacity to the industry, and were teamed with powerful mailroom equipment which could assemble preprinted sections and inserts at full press speeds, changing the production paradigm in Australia and influencing trends in the rest of the world.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of Johnson’s career was when – after completing the installation of new presses in Perth – he found himself in charge of the commissioning of new press and mailroom equipment in union-torn New York.
He recalled to GXpress in 2003 how he had been “keeping an eye” on the project with monthly trips between Australia and the US when Lachlan Murdoch walked past and told him the vice president of operations was leaving and, “You’re in charge until we find a replacement”.
It was the start of an 18-month rollercoaster assignment embracing a tricky plant commissioning in a hostile industrial environment. Johnson had had his own concerns about the fragmentation of the project, and elements which included a shaftless Goss press, hopper-fed inserting in the GMA-equipped mailroom, and a premature switch to CTP.
But with equipment orders placed, the building designed, ground broken and some concrete poured, he had to make it work.“It was a bit frightening, but little or nothing could be undone,” he told me then.
Johnson learned fast about the power of the city’s unions and problems dating from the previous ownership which included manning practices evocative of the bad old days of London’s Fleet Street.
“If I achieved anything there, I think it may have been more on the human part of the exercise than the mechanical one,” he told me at the time.
The career which led to what he has called ‘the best job in the world’ began when he was working as an apprentice on ‘The Land’ in Chippendale, where commercial work included production of the ‘Printing Trades Journal’.
Given an advertisement for compositors for a new national newspaper in Canberra. He applied for, and got the job almost before he had finished marking-up the ad.
Most of his time with News has been in his role as group technical manager. “I’d worked my way up, following the shirt-tails of Ken Cowley, until I was production manager of the group,” he says.
“When Ken Cowley was appointed assistant general manager in August 1975, I got his job as technical manager,” he says.
News was already a substantial – if somewhat disparate – group with printing offices all around the country, and ready for “rational thinking,” he recalled. Among sites were Southdown Press in Melbourne, Sun Newspapers in Brisbane, and rural outfits in places such as Horsham and Tamworth.
The Darwin project – installing a six-unit Community in the post-cyclone city, while converting from hot-metal to Compugraphic photocomposition at the same time – came a couple of years later ... and there hasn’t been an idle moment since.
“I learned everything in that first project,” Johnson recalled.“Everyone there seemed to be running away from something – the police, their wife or the bank manager – and retraining was the last thing they wanted.”
But with the core help of “some good people” there and within the group, the project was the first of many successes. “In hindsight, it was fairly daunting,” he says. “Perhaps I should have been more concerned than I was, but nothing’s worried me since.”
There have been many other projects: A replica plant in Horsham, and a further upgrade in Darwin which looked straightforward until the production manager was injured and Johnson ended up running the plant.
He had organised the moving of former Sydney ‘Daily Telegraph’ presses – acquired with the newspaper from ACP in 1972 – to Perth for the ‘Sunday Times’, and was working on a new plant for the Brisbane ‘Sun’ when Rupert Murdoch clinched the acquisition of the Herald & Weekly Times group early in1987.
Johnson recalls that an order had already been placed for a new press for Brisbane and land purchased at Murarrie. In the end, that press was diverted to Glasgow in Scotland, and a “series of events” led to the placing of the world’s largest-ever order for printing machinery.
New colour presses for Wapping, Knowsley and Glasgow in the UK, plus Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane added up to a little short of $1 billion.
Other projects have included installing three lines of Geoman for the ‘Sunday Times’, Perth and reconfiguring and adding to the Holmes à Court facility in Canningvale, WA, the single-width KBA sites at Molendinar on the Gold Coast, Hobart and now Darwin, replacement of all but one of the double-width presses in Sydney with new manroland Geoman lines, and upgrades in Melbourne Brisbane and Adelaide.
Another new Geoman, saved from the Sydney project, goes on edition in a new building annexe in Townsville at the end of next month.
At 69, Johnson says he is finally ready for the “easier option” of retirement, but keen to keep in touch with the industry. It’s mutual, apparently: Already there have been a number of invitations to get involved as a consultant on projects around the world.