The plant in Broxbourne, 32 kilometres north of London, will be used to print the company's four British papers, including two racy tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World, and the more sober-minded Times and Sunday Times.

The new plant is already in use and should be fully operational by the end of next month. It represents the final phase in a 650-million-pound (S$1.79 billion) investment in three state-of-the-art printing plants. It houses 12 presses capable of producing more than 1 million full colour newspapers per hour on a site big enough to house 23 soccer fields.

'This new Broxbourne facility represents an enormous advance in our capabilities,' Mr James Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. Europe and Asia, said on Monday. 'Our investment should be ample answer to those who believe the business of journalism, in print, is a business for yesterday's readers, not tomorrow's. We believe that print will continue to be a driving force in our business, even as we expand and grow in this connected age.'

Mr Joe Urschel, executive director of the Newseum newspaper museum in Washington, D.C., said he had never heard of a facility capable of producing so many papers so quickly.

'USA Today produces a lot of papers using a lot of plants in the United States and around the world, but not so many in one place,' he said.

News International spokeswoman Daisy Dunlop said the press was the largest in the world in terms of the number of newspapers that could be produced there.

'We have been running live trials since before the end of last year and the Sun and News of the World started there in January, with the Times and Sunday Times set for full production at the end of next month,' she said. 'It's been a soft launch.'

The three new plants, including ones located in Glasgow in Scotland and Knowsley in northwest England, use 19 MAN Roland presses from Germany. The speed of the new machines will allow the company's newspapers to use later deadlines, she said.

The new facilities mark the demise of the company's printing operations in Wapping in East London, where printing press unionists clashed with police during the 1980s as jobs were eliminated.

Ms Dunlop said News International's remaining presses in Wapping will be sold. Some of the company's older presses have already been sold to Spanish companies, she said.

Mr Michael Fenton, who worked in London presses when the newspaper business was going strong and now helps his son run the Old Print Shop of London, said the manpower needed for the new Murdoch presses is remarkably low.

'You can't stop it, that's capitalism,' said Mr Fenton, who hopes to open a museum with old printing presses on display. 'Most of the jobs have gone. It only takes about 300 men for the whole process. What they're doing now is amazing, considering I'm looking at a press made in 1805 that needed one or two minutes to print one newspaper.'

Mr Fenton conceded that the printing jobs that have disappeared as technology has improved are not coming back, but he said the new investment shows that newspapers have a strong future despite the competition from Google, Yahoo and other online competitors.

'I think there is always a great future for the newspaper,' he said. 'We as a family will always get a newspaper, we're not prepared to just look at screens.'

Mr Murdoch's News Corp recently took control of the Wall Street Journal, but there are no immediate plans to publish that paper's European edition at any of the new plants, Ms Dunlop said.

News International, which operates the new printing presses, is a subsidiary of News Corp. -- AP