Would confronting the vexed question of how long you will be publishing printed newspapers be easier if you could remove the issues of how and by whom they would be printed?
Perhaps you know you need to print more efficiently, need more colour capacity to meet competitive demands, the ability to print more copies to exploit a market opportunity even, but don't know how long you have to amortise the costs. Or where the money is to come from.
That's the premise of a new report which canvasses 'New and emerging business models of newspaper printing companies'.
Published by WAN-Ifra, it was launched during that organisation's conference in Mumbai and was being introduced at the ASEAN Newspaper Printers conference in Bangkok immediately afterwards by one of its contributors, Kasturi Balaji, who is a director of the Indian publisher of The Hindu as well as chairman of WAN-Ifra's South Asia committee and its World Printers Forum.
Balaji's Chennai-headquartered company, Kasturi & Sons has been outsourcing printing since the 1980s when it launched a New Delhi edition of The Hindu and now contracts production in six other centres. In some cases it contracted an existing company, and others it helped a printer set up a facility, perhaps handing over older presses as it did in Hubli.
Meanwhile of course, publishers in mature markets such as the US, Europe and Australia wrestle with falling print circulations and perhaps, whether to share production facilities with a rival.
'New and emerging business models' doesn't answer these questions, but it delivers ideas and examples to stimulate the discussion. The main options it studies are:
• establishing a new printing business - as in the case of the Rheinisch Post's RBD subsidiary - or as an internal but separate profit-centre, such as Yedioth Ahronoth;
• transferring press operation to a third party service group, which is what Mittelrhein-Verlag in Koblenz, Germany, did progressively, and then with a new facility it built;
• the report also looks at TMI Services, the company which delivers this service not only for Rheinisch Post but for other publishers;
• TMI is also a shareholder in a joint venture company, and the report looks at another example in the form of Druckzentrum Rhein Main, which has been working since 2010 outside traditional union agreements to operate an eight-tower triple-wide press with five folders, mailroom and other equipment. An eight-to-ten year return is expected on the two partners' 96 million Euros investment;
• the classic model of the specialist printer is represented by North America's Transcontinental group, which builds specialist facilities, fixing costs for customers such as the Globe & Mail in Toronto (and of course, the San Francisco Chronicle) and can bring additional services such as heatset printing and shared distribution to the mix;
• the report also cites an "online printer" developed by BechtleVerlag&Druck, which appears to be a marketing front for its coldset and heatset production offering, but also outsources work to a site with Berliner-sized equipment in order to offer a full range of local formats. Interesting is the apparent use of social media and techniques such as search engine optimisation to drive orders.
Much is made of the legal implications (and complications) associated with these models, most of which relate to German entities, and I suspect there may be additional unspoken benefits, perhaps from escaping industrial or cultural problems.
To what extent the case studies can be translated to the context of other countries probably isn't the issue; what's important is that the individual situations will stimulate thought and discussion.
What it doesn't address is the issue of how exploitation of the digital newspaper printing opportunity is to be addressed. That, presumably, will be the topic of another report.
-Peter Coleman
Comments