Ten or 15 digital print sites could make a difference to the way News Corp Australia does business, Geoff Booth says.
But pulling plans together for a pilot operation in Brisbane is fraught with difficulty, the production and logistics national director admits: “It’s not an easy project to get going, and we have met hurdles we didn’t expect,” he says.
Industry reports that the project – which would put inkjet web and inline finishing equipment into News’ Murarrie print site – had been canned were wrong: “Dead is not correct.
“There are issues to work through, and we have other things to look at,” says Booth, who has just returned from annual leave. “It’s a terribly big step.”
Explaining the lack of progress to GXpress, Booth indicated just how big it might be.
“Brisbane doesn’t solve a problem for us, it just gives us the opportunity to learn how it could work in terms of costs and times and printhead life and so on,” he says.
“A more realistic situation would be Alice Springs or Port Lincoln or a dozen other places which would give an immediate return.”
News currently airlifts copies of its tabloid Herald-Sun from Melbourne for the Queensland and northern New South Wales market, and has named Kodak and manroland as preferred partners for a digital print operation which would take over production in Brisbane.
In Australia’s ‘Red Centre’, copies of News’ biweekly Centralian Advocate are currently printed in Darwin and trucked the 1500 km, 16-hour journey to Alice Springs. Digital print facilities there would enable the publisher not only to carry more up-to-date news, but also expand sales of its daily Northern Territory News and other titles.
The “seafood capital” of Port Lincoln – also mentioned by Booth – suffers from the “tyranny of distance” which challenges many parts of Australia. Although only 280 km from Adelaide “as the crow flies” – in a straight line across the Spencer and St Vincent gulfs – it is 646 km away by road. The “local” newspaper there, Fairfax Media’s biweekly Port Lincoln Times, is printed in Murray Bridge, east of Adelaide.
It’s likely that any publisher planning remote digital print sites across Australia’s vast geography will look for contract work printing the newspapers of current competitors and others. Globally, most digital newspaper printing is undertaken by contract printers or distributors on behalf of publishers.
But Booth says the level of investment required for its own plans is likely to be beyond the capability of third-party contractors: “It’s a totally different investment conversation,” he says. “One piece of equipment won’t make a difference to the business, ten or 15 will.”
And he adds, “We’re still working through the detail.”
Peter Coleman
Pictured:Geoff Booth at the Murarrie print site