Tools for a print revival

Sep 18, 2015 at 01:09 pm by Staff


As you do, I heard last week from someone who wanted to print a newspaper (writes Peter Coleman).

In Italy, it seemed - I put him in touch with hybrid offset-and-digital specialist CSQ - or maybe the world.

As we communicated, it transpired that his plan was really for a global publication, published in all major capital cities, but that initial circulation in each might only be quite small... as in hundreds of copies.

And while I left him to consider that distribution might be a bigger issue than printing, I pondered the extent to which such a project has become eminently feasible - from a technical, if not a marketing point of view.

Smartphone and tablet news apps and the host of other digital variants may be more fashionable than their hard-copy predecessors, but there's little denying that printed newspapers retain impact and gravitas that digital publishers have so far been unable to replicate.

Emerging and evolving technology constantly creates new opportunities for publishers, and it does it again and again. At the turn of the previous century it was the Linotype, rotary and reel-fed flatbed presses such as the Cossar... and of course the telephone.

By the 1970s and 80s, it was offset printing, phototypesetting and desktop publishing, fax and data transfer. You don't need me to relate the current story, placed in the context of "change will never be as slow as it is today".

But while digital and social media have changed publishing, print is surviving and evolving. And right now, technology favours those print publishers with small niche markets to serve.

I have been reading Margaret Rees-Jones' Printer's Progress, in which she relates the history of the Gisborne Herald in New Zealand. It includes a 1925 quote from UK magazine Punch that "wherever two Englishmen live together, they form a club; when ten thousand New Zealanders dwell, they start a newspaper" - a reference to the number of newspapers per head of population in that perhaps over-papered country.

Ninety years later, hyperlocal publishing in its many forms remains an opportunity. In Bangalore a couple of years back, ABP chief executive D.D. Purkayastha spoke eloquently of a vision of a newspaper for every electoral division, still 'big numbers' by western publishing standards.

Print remains a sympathetic and popular medium in which to express a view: In Australia, Morry Schwartz' The Saturday Paper - now printed in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - is a reinvention of the weekly journal, and perhaps the form in which titles which currently have greater frequency will end up.

So back to technology: Despite the focus on digital media, servicing a need to produce printed newspapers quickly and efficiently still drives vendors to innovation as it did for example, in the 1890s and 1960s.

The urge to write still drives man and woman, but a computer algorithm can do it too - even write poetry - albeit less eloquently. Software can design news pages, even if it still has trouble with elegant headline shapes. And digital and offset print technology is evolving to deliver appropriate means to put a niche message on paper.

Once more, it could be time for a revival.



Digital print looks for a tipping point

Two or three factors are driving the long-awaited take-off of digital newspaper printing.

Not that it is new: Small runs typically of newspapers for expats and holidaymakers - and first and business class airline customers - have been printed digitally for years.

But these have been premium products, where a premium production cost was acceptable, if unwelcome.

What's changed is that technologies such as Kodak's Stream inkjet, higher production speeds and cheaper consumables have brought down the per-copy cost... the one factor vendors had previously been reluctant to talk about.

Finishing options have also expanded, with manroland's FoldLine (newspapers) and FormerLine (book) systems - which are fast enough to be viable inline - and a complex upgrade to Hunkeler's cut-collate-fold systems in the form of the Combi-Solution.

A third factor may be the apparent willingness of some vendors to kick-start the market by coming in as a joint-venture partner, as Kodak is in Jersey. Plans for the Jersey Evening Post are, for the moment, formative although a new company owned by Kodak and publisher Guiton has been established.

By contrast, the phased production of Walliser Bote in Switzerland - touted as the first all digitally-printed daily - is relatively less ambitious but more risky, depending on one inkjet web and one finishing line. The system at publisher Mengis Druck & Verlag (above and bottom) teams an HP T400 colour inkjet with manroland's FoldLine, and then uses a customised system based on Müller Martini's Alphaliner inserter to collate sections and handle route-specific distribution and zoning of inserts.

Production at the 175-year-old publisher is typically focussed on a single 24-page product with a run of 22,000-32,000 copies, although the intention is to take on a variety of other work including book blocks, mailers and personalised marketing pieces, for which the equipment has been configured.

Mengis will stage the changeover from offset to digital, keeping its web-offset newspaper press available for the next six months, bedding down digital production and allowing for the fact that printing will take twice as long that at present. And against a schedule that leaves "no resources left for mistakes" is an undertaking from HP that production speeds on the T400 will be increased "step by step".

Again the 183 metres/minute T400 inkjet web - with its web width of more than a metre - is an option which did not exist a year or two ago, and the intention is to use 40 per cent of its capacity on commercial work.

"The more you think about the new possibilities of the installation, the more fascinating, almost fantastic it sounds," director Martin Seematter says.

Print technology addresses the niche publication

Targetting niche demographic or geographic audiences is in many respects about turning the clock back.

Many publishers have bowed to pressure from pressroom costs to reduce the number and frequency of editions in order to save the time, waste and of course, cost associated with stopping a press to change a page or entire edition, and increased colour usage has aggravated the problem.

In some markets, it has been easy to address localisation with the suburban frees that 'ring fence' flagship editions. Yet in others - such as the prosperous German market - intense regionalisation is still in demand.

It's one of the drivers which keeps publishers updating to the most-automated press equipment... and keeps orders flowing to the two German manufacturers - KBA and manroland web - which dominate the top end of the newspaper market. Both offer automated and in some cases robotic solutions to change plates, which will have arrived presorted by some form of conveyor.

This year has seen the introduction of a solution for the smaller end of the market in the form of a single-width Goss press which can change all the plates of a colour edition - effectively regardless of size - in a stop of not much more than a couple of minutes.

The first two Magnum Compact installations have taken place in the last couple of months - one in New York and the other in Sri Lanka - and it will be interesting to see what they do with them.

A free ferry ride from Manhatten is Staten Island and the Staten Island Advance, a flagship of Advance Publications, and at the heart of a company which owns magazine publisher Condé Nast, newspapers and websites in more than two dozen American cities - most with their own print facilities - plus business and sports publishers and interests including cable television.

Samuel Irving Newhouse, who founded the business in 1922, is reputed to have run Advance from a carpet bag bursting with documents. These days - still family-owned - it counts Staten Island as home to its headquarters, and you can be sure that the new press will be subjected to close scrutiny as a result.

As the publishing industry changes, so does Advance, which has its own digital publishing operation and is reported to have paid $500 million for big data discovery firm 1010data through an affiliate last month. Synergies within the company and its new-found ability to produce ultra short-run colour newspapers are not hard to see.

Across the globe in Sri Lanka, Express Newspapers (Ceylon) is an entirely different proposition. The 85-year-old company produces newspapers for the country's Tamil speaking population including daily Virakesari (which means 'brave lion') and weekly titles for Tamils and the Muslim population, serviced from Colombo and through seven branch offices across the island. Seven magazines cover everything from culture and dance to construction and interior design, to health and wellness; three further tabloid-sheet publications are in Tamil and one in English.

Into this complex production scenario, the all-colour Goss Magnum Compact joins an existing single-width Community - which the company has progressively extended - Komori heatset and sheetfed equipment.

The new Goss prints at up to 45,000 cph, with automation including ink presets, start-up routines, register and auto-pasters. Press and CTP prepress are also complemented by recently-upgraded editorial and advertising systems, most of it from Indian developer Summit.

Print orders can be substantial: The broadsheet Virakesari runs about 60,000 on weekdays and twice that for its 64-page Sunday edition which has readers in 15 countries. Dailies Thinakkural (30,000 copies), Vidivelli (30,000), tabloid Metro News (25,000 copies) and Malai and English-language daily titles add to the workload. And that's without the magazines and niche publications.

Here the three-tower press - with its integrated systems to quickly change all plates and reduce changeover times - was a major attraction for a company which wants more editions to address the ethnic diversity and demographic mix.

Robots and algorithms help put the paper to bed

Having considered two ways of putting ink on paper for short-run, niche print publications, a word on creating and handling content.

Firstly, the choice of offset or digital printing will depend on specific market needs: If you can benefit from targetting a product down to an "audience of one", digital print is the only choice, and database-driven software is available to help you.

Layered PDFs can bring content components together; preferences and information collected from a website would (or could) help drive the personalised product, and there are examples of such projects.

More likely, you'll want editions with runs in the low '000s or even hundreds - and either print option could be viable - and you'll want help with managing content.

Technology continues to deliver this: Software that collects results from Twitter and writes school sports reports - see Presteligence's My Team Scoop high school sports platform - and software that will write almost anything else that can be produced from data. Even, amazingly, software that will write poetry, if that's what you would like (see NYT samples above left).

Narrative Science was a pioneer in this field, and last year, Associated Press started automating quarterly earnings reports using Automated Insights' Wordsmith platform. And the Los Angeles Times was quick off the mark with a report about an earthquake three minutes after it occurred, thanks to an algorithm written by journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke.

A week before we were going to press, a systems developer notified us of another interesting development: Software which will automatically design and lay-out news pages, with or without advertisements.

Any of the developments in the last couple of paragraphs - or the last couple of pages - could be interpreted as a threat to people's jobs.

But that's not the way it usually happens. New technology creates opportunities, and if that means you can produce page artwork quicker, and with fewer staff, it also means you can economically produce more of it.

Niche, localised pages for a new style of publication in which - for example - you can sell the same advertisement space many times over.

Now there's an opportunity.

Automated page layout, controlled from your mobile

A UK-headquartered systems developer has introduced software which automatically lays out editorial pages.

Miles 33 has added the tools - which paginate pages in seconds - to a new version of its GN4 editorial CMS. Pages are populated into templates - even in background - using tagged story files and linked pictures, with less than a minute claimed for the production of 30 pages.

Launched this month, the concept begs a number of questions, and a media statement says completed pages "can be scrutinised by newsroom staff prior to releasing". Meaning a good stone sub may be called for to address decisions about headline shape, and which stories to cut and which to omit. But for publishers with a large number of pages to process, it could be a huge timesaver.

Operations and content management director Peter Meek says editorial staff are often faced with increased pressures with the need to prepare content for multiple channels: "If some of the time spent doing standard pages can be automated, time can be made available to grow a digital, multi-channel presence," he says.

Miles 33 has been working with customers in Europe, the UK and the USA to develop features that would automate portions of the publishing process. The sample comes from a large UK group of local and regional newspapers.

Fitting into the context of the company's new Gemstone advertising sales system - with its automated page 'dummy' - the auto publishing part of the process:

"The auto process is blisteringly fast and can paginate as many as 30 pages in less than a minute," Meek says.

The Version 2.2 GN4 release is supported by a responsive HTML5 client which runs on iOS devices, so invoking the auto pagination run when out of the office is an option... and much of the infrastructure exists to paginate pages and sections, completely as a web service.

-Peter Coleman


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