Registration for the 2012-2014 edition of the competition is open until 31 December and is nearing a record number of participants for the "club of the world's best". The award, held every two years since 1994, sets quality standards for newspaper colour reproduction, which increases visual impact and is important to both readers and advertisers alike.
The successful newspapers demonstrate their capacity to print to exacting ISO standards and reliably reproduce colour images and advertisements consistently, worldwide, and with the intended colour effect.
Full details, including registration information, can be found at http://www.colorqualityclub.org.
Why do newspaper printers from around the world take part in the competition?
"Regular participation in the INCQC competitions has made our internal processes transparent and improved the skills of our personnel. This leads to standardisation for quality management," said Jochen Engelbrecht, head of media production at Heilbronner Stimme in Germany.
Sanat Hazra, production director at Times of India, said: "In addition to benchmarking quality and processes with international standards, INCQC also creates a constancy of purpose across the organization."
The International Newspaper Color Quality Club is claimed to be the only printing quality competition worldwide for newspapers. The competition has been organised by WAN-IFRA since 1994 at two-year intervals and is supported by many national newspaper associations.
All newspapers can participate, independent of whether it is published daily, weekly or as a freesheet, printed by coldset or heatset-offset process on standard newsprint or improved or tinted paper.
The internationally recognised ISO 12647-3 standard is the binding technical basis for INCQC participation as implementing the clearly understandable and reproducible rules in production guarantees standardised and predictable results. This in turn ensures that personnel are motivated by clear production objectives and unjustified customer complaints can be addressed on the basis of objective parameters.
WAN-IFRA, based in Paris, France, and Darmstadt, Germany, with subsidiaries in Singapore, India, Spain, France and Sweden, is the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers. It represents more than 18 000 publications, 15 000 online sites and over 3000 companies in more than 120 countries. The organisation was created by the merger of the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the research and service organisation for the news publishing industry.
Go to: http://www.wan-ifra.org
