Newspaper & Mailroom
Australasian newspaper printers conference in Hobart, Tasmania
Thursday 21. April 2011 - KBA Comet a high spot at SWUG 2011
Hobart, with some 200,000 inhabitants the biggest city in Tasmania and just an hours flight from Melbourne, was the venue at the end of March for the 25th Single Width Users Group (SWUG) annual conference, an Australian and New Zealand newspaper industry event.
Held at the Wrest Point Conference Centre, the conference was attended by some 220 delegates from 41 print sites and focussed on trends and innovations in newspaper production. Speakers from the USA, Europe and Asia joined local experts from Australia and New Zealand to provide an entertaining and varied event.
The traditional printing-plant tour this year was to Davies Brothers in Glenorchy Technopark, north of Hobart. Bob Lockley, chief executive for web printing at Fairfax Media, and longstanding SWUG president, says: “The printing plant, which opened in May 2009, was a great site to visit and a good opportunity to see one of the most modern single-width presses in Australia in action.”
Third KBA Comet for News Limited
Davies Brothers, which is owned by Australian media major News Limited, uses a six-tower KBA Comet with a double KF3 folder to print a local title, The Mercury, along with the Sunday Tasmanian and part-editions of the Australian and the Herald-Sun. The knowledgeable audience was visibly taken by the KBA press, among them a team from the Northern Territory News in Darwin, which will soon be taking delivery of their own Comet. Following installations in Molendinar (2004) and Hobart (2009) the Comet for Darwin is the third press of this type at a News Limited plant. At the West Australian in Perth a duplex press line comprising a hybrid Comet and a double-wide KBA Colora is also pumping out high-quality products.
The conference closed with a gala dinner and the annual SWUG Awards.