NZME paper achieves global ranking

NZME Ellerslie has received international recognition from Wan-Ifra’s International Newspaper Colour Quality Club. The Kiwi printer has gained repeat entry to the Club and its production of the 32-page, four-section and 10,000-copy broadsheet Chinese Herald, has received a ranking of 30 out of 150 global entrants. The broadsheet, printed four times per week on a 20-year-old Goss HT70 press, featured as the only Australasian entry in the 2016-2018 competition cycle. Russell Wieck, operations manager at NZME Ellerslie, says, “The WAN-IFRA process is very intensive and demanding — you either get accepted or you fail. Entrants have to print a product on a set date over three consecutive months. Contained within each copy is the Ifra Cuboid, which effectively records data relevant to the technical element of the submission. “Successful entrants must surpass a base score on each monthly assessment of the Cuboid production and NZME Ellerslie did so with flying colours, achieving 538.21 out of a possible 540 points collectively. “Following this analysis, judges selected two random copies and scrutinised the first 16 pages of each for print quality. Successful entrants again need to surpass a base score and NZME Ellerslie ultimately did this with distinction, achieving 534 out of a possible 576 points collectively.†Wieck credits the ’10-year journey’ his firm has embarked upon with the Quality Club as having significantly lifted quality standards at NZME Ellerslie for the benefit of all involved. He says, “As a longstanding newspaper printing facility, we thought we were pretty good at what we were doing — before then submitting three, consecutive unsuccessful attempts to gain entry to the Quality Club. “However, the journey that has unfolded over the past decade has enabled our team to learn so much more about printing. We are now striving for a standard of excellence that was well beyond what we thought possible. “That confirms, even though our press is 20 years old, it is still able to produce world-class quality. And that comes down to the people who are using it. It is really about harnessing the passion, training and skills of the staff.†He says NZME Ellerslie passes benefits of the experience directly to the firm’s publisher and commercial clients. He says, “Our day-to-day quality is now so much higher. What we have learned along the way, we would never have learned by any other means — there would have been no other reason to put ourselves under that amount of scrutiny. “The numerous international and domestic print quality awards won by the site in recent years confirm that taking the Quality Club journey has indeed paid huge dividends.†The company will receive a certificate to acknowledge its acceptance to the Colour Quality Club 2016-2018 at a ceremony held in Austria in October this year.