International Newspaper Color Quality Club 2010-12
Fourteen Indian dailies
shine among world’s top 109
W AN-IFRA has announced that 109 newspapers in 43 countries have been awarded membership in the International Newspaper Color Quality Club (INCQC) for 2010 through 2012, the prestigious award for newspaper print quality world-wide. Among these winners of global print honours, fourteen newspapers are from India including: Anandabazar Patrika, Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, Deccan Herald, Divya Bhaskar, DNA, Hindustan, Hindustan Times, Malayala Manorama, Mid Day, Mint, The Hindu, The Telegraph, and The Times of India. While in INCQC 2008–2010, four dailies including DNA, Hindustan, Hindustan Times, and Maharashtra Herald could make India proud getting the membership in the club of world’s top fifty newspapers.
The awards set quality standards for newspaper colour reproduction, which increases visual impact and is important to both readers and advertisers alike. The successful newspapers have demonstrated their capacity to print to exacting ISO standards and reliably reproduce colour images and advertisements consistently, worldwide, and with the intended colour effect.
The competition, held every two years since 1994, requires entrants to print a specific test element and submit examples from production runs over four months. Newspapers that reproduce the element within specific tolerances and present good printing quality are welcomed into the exclusive INCQC. Benefits of INCQC membership to newspapers are numerous including: meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations about print quality; benchmarking colour quality against well-defined standards by participating in the only worldwide newspaper print quality competition; receiving a detailed audit, which highlights areas of strength as well as areas of potential improvement, including the identification of printing defects; providing motivation and justification to staff members for the introduction of required changes; receiving powerful marketing tools for extended business and convincing customers; proven and verified colour quality in daily production by keeping demanding standards; and testified general printing quality, evaluated under ‘typical reader conditions’.
“The INCQC quality initiative helps ensure that the reader receives an attractive, high-quality product and the advertiser gets an outstanding advertising carrier,” said Manfred Werfel, executive director of newspaper production at WAN-IFRA, the world’s leading organisation of newspaper and media publishing, adding, “For publishing companies, the competition provides a better understanding of the ISO standards to improve the printing process.”
