Did you know that your local newspaper is actually printed locally? Has anyone told you that many other newspapers distributed all across the broad southern Saskatchewan region and even into Manitoba are also printed in Estevan by local people?
Have you realized that Estevan actually has the printing company that has the potential to produce an endless list of print mediums from menus and catalogues to newspapers and books, and now they are also taking on the magazine production? All that is done at the Estevan Web Printing, which is located just a couple of kilometres west of the Energy City.
Corey Dornian, who is the production manager at Estevan Web Printing, knows the operation from A to Z as he started from the bottom and tried out almost every job. He took the Mercury on a tour around the plant, explaining what it takes to put a paper together and showing what other capacities the printing company has.
A really complicated but fascinating printing process starts at the pre-press department. It is a relatively small room where product templates usually sent over the Internet are transferred onto aluminum plates with the help of giant laser printers.
The plates then go into benders that form them to the press. What took hours and even days of manual labour centuries ago, now is a matter of only three minutes. Once plates are burnt, no corrections can be made, so if there are any mistakes on a page that is going to be printed, a new plate needs to be made to replace it. Employees take the bent plates and set them on press cylinders, which are a part of the big printing plant consisting of 10 printing towers.
Four pressmen and two supervisors operate two printing stations that control the printing towers. The entire process, including colour fine-tuning, is controlled from the stations. The new system was installed at Estevan Web about 10 years ago, prior to that, the process required people going up each tower to manage the colours and ink by hand.
And even though the system that is currently used at Estevan Web Printing is moderate in the printing world, it creates endless opportunities for numerous printing needs, while requiring only six or seven people to run it.
Huge black, red, blue and yellow ink touts are located on the far end of the press room and automatically feed the nine offset printing towers through ink lines, which are small pipes, spread out over the walls and the ceiling.
The only UV tower located in the middle of the plant is used for printing magazines and specialties. It has its own barrels that supply special ink, cured by big UV lamps on top of the tower.
Each printing tower feeds from two giant paper rolls located in the back. The roll room, filled with hundreds of rolls of all sizes, is restocked on a regular basis and an employee ensures that rolls are loaded into the feeders in a timely manner, which allows for non-stop printing.
Printed paper sheets come up and above the towers, flying towards the folder, a machine that folds them into needed formats. Then the stacker organizes the printed materials.
From there, papers are taken to what Dornian called a “big dinosaur” – an AlphaLiner, machine that inserts prepacked flyers into the papers. The newspapers are then organized into bundles by employees and are sent out to final destinations or to carriers who deliver them to your doors.
Even though the pandemic reduced the amount of work for the printing company, they didn’t need to lay anyone off and still employ over 30 full-time and part-time local workers. And while some of the jobs don’t require particular education, the fulfillment of other duties needs a lot of specific knowledge.
Even though pressman isn't recognized in Saskatchewan, it is a journeyman trade, and when required Estevan Web Printing trains their employees.
The printing company produces from 500,000 to a million copies of newspapers, flyers and specialties on average every week, but it has the capacity to do much more. Product-wise, Estevan Web Printing can cover most of the advertising and commercial needs a business may have, providing the best quality in a timely manner.
“We can do a lot of different things. We (recently) did The Tower (Café) menu. We can do anything you come up with,” said Dornian.
Estevan Web Printing is always open for business and ready to help companies of all types and sizes to reach their goals using all tools available.
