Montreal-based Transcontinental Printing has ordered three presses that it will use to print the Chronicle starting on May 1, 2009. As the Press Club reported in November, the Chronicle plans to get out of the printing business when its current contract with Teamster pressmen expires and turn the work over to Transcontinental, which will build a plant in the Bay Area. Graphic Arts Monthly reports that Transcontinental is investing $200 million in its new plant here and will install three Coleman XXL presses from MAN Roland. For those who love presses, here are the details Graphic Arts Monthly reported:

The presses will also be the first 6 x 2 blanket-to-blanket newspaper presses in North America. Each shaftless press will be configured with three eight-couple towers fed by four MAN Roland CD-15 XXL reelstands and operated from two Pecom control consoles, and be capable of producing 36 broadsheet pages in full process color, or 48 broadsheet pages with 24 in full color.

The outsourcing of printing is becoming more popular for daily newspaper owners. The three big national papers, NY Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal, have been outsourcing much of their work for decades, though the Chronicle would be the largest daily to outsource all of its printing. In 2005, the 70,000-circulation Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., shut down its printing operation and outsourced to Southwest Offset in Gardena, Calif. Southwest also prints the San Mateo Daily Journal and the Daily News Group (Palo Alto Daily News, San Mateo Daily News, etc.) at its plant in Redwood City.