Delegates at next week’s PANPA Future Forum are being teased with the concept of personalised daily newspaper production through a ‘PANPA Digital Daily’ which is neither daily, nor even printed in Australia.

Rival Dainippon Screen – which has a speaker at the Friday workshops – is also flying in an unpersonalised digitally-printed special for the forum, this time printed at a newspaper site in Dubai.

A PR handout late last week announced ‘PANPA and Océ to produce “Newspaper of the Future” at annual forum’… but the one-off promotional leaflet is actually being printed in Europe.

A statement said the “16-page PANPA Digital Daily, will be a fully ‘versionised’ newspaper with stories and advertisements individualised for each reader” and was accompanied by a PDF of a sample copy. In it, individual recipients are addressed by their first name, some images personalised, and other changes made, using variable data technology already established when it featured in the cover story of the first issue of GX, a dozen years ago.

Keen to know more, we pressed Peter Haydock of Océ’s PR agency for the technical detail on what was being touted as “an Australian first” and “the first publication of its kind produced in Australia”. Where was the press? Did they have a customer for the Jetstream inkjet web in Australia, or was it in a showroom, somewhere, we asked excitedly.

The answer is neither: “Alas the name is a misnomer,” Haydock says.

“While, of course, it is well within the realms of possibility to do it as a daily, it was printed as a one-off teaser to draw attention to the potential of digital.

“We did the personalisation at Poing (Germany) using our own Document Composition Engine. Thereafter we also printed it in Poing on a JetStream 2200 at 150 m/minute or 2,025 A4 images p/minute. Then we forwarded the reel to Hunkeler in Switzerland who folded it and shipped it to Melbourne, from whence it will be posted to illustrious recipients such as yourself.”

So there’s the story. PANPA delegates and others – the dummy PDF has captions and images of 60 individuals including the likes of John Hartigan and George Calvi of News, Brian McCarthy and Bob Lockley of Fairfax – will receive a personalised sample of an all-colour ‘newspaper’ which could have been printed on a digital inkjet press in Sydney.

But wasn’t.

In fact a variety of digital printing equipment – some sheetfed, some web – is in use in the city and elsewhere in Australasia, mostly in transaction and promotional (transpromo) print applications. A new report backed by industry vendors including Océ, plus other digital print players Canon, Fuji Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Konica Minolta and Ricoh, says 13.8 billion A4-equivalent pages were printed digitally in Australia last year, 3.4 billion of them in colour.

Although this was only marginally more than in 2008, the number of colour pages increased by 55 per cent. The study by PODi Aust NZ covers only high-speed production based applications.

Some newspaper-capable equipment has been installed in the region, including a Screen inkjet web at Astra Printing in New Zealand, and toner-based Océ systems with limited colour capability used for newspapers.

Peter Scott, who will co-present the Screen Australia workshop, says 500 digitally-printed newspapers have been flown in for PANPA delegates. These were printed by Atlas Printing of Dubai where a Truepress Jet520 digital press prints several international titles during the night, for delivery to the expatriate community in the United Arab Emirates.

In a now-familiar scenario, some readers in Dubai get their news before their home-based compatriots, with PDF files for the UK ‘Daily Mail’ received between 2 and 3 am with production completed by 4:30 am, Dubai time.

Screen claims more than 200 digital web installations worldwide including those of its OEM partner Infoprint Solutions (now part of Ricoh).

A single-engine Truepress Jet520 to be shown at the at Visual Impact/PrintWorks Expo in Sydney (September 20-22) is being pre-assembled and tested at Screen’s technical centre in North Ryde. The company says it will be the first time a high-volume inkjet web has been exhibited in Australia.

Chief executive of the Newspaper Publishers Association (PANPA) Mark Hollands says the project was a conceived to demonstrate what is possible with a digital press. “This technology presents an opportunity to create new products and revenue streams,” he says. “I'm attracted by its capacity to allow personalisation of newspapers, sections and magazines. But it in no way replaces offset technology for newspapers.

“Digital technology reduces waste for short-run products, and allows a publisher to create an on-demand model for printing publications, as well as expand into other commercial areas. This is something all newspaper publishers should consider.

"There is no reason for print centres to be seen as a cost-centre. Maximising the value of the skills and equipment of print operations should be a key component of publishers' future strategy.”

Océ marketing manager for production printing Herbert Kieleithner says their project is only a small example of how versionised newspapers might progress. Others include:

• different stories and advertisements can match the preferences of each reader;

• as in the example of the ‘Niiu’ daily in Berlin, readers can choose their own news sections from internationally-known mastheads;

• European supermarkets are producing weekly personalised catalogues based on checkout records of shoppers’ personal preferences.

Perhaps the enabling issue newspaper publishers need to discuss at next week’s Future Forum (August 26-27, Sydney) is how to get over (or around) their love-hate relationship with newsagents and create a realistic mechanism for individual delivery of personalised newspapers.

Peter Coleman

Download the Océ ‘Digital Daily’ data file