Digitize printing: At some point, many American newspapers will, or should, cross a line where it would be more practical and cost-efficient to sell off high-speed newspaper presses and replace them with digital print-on-demand units spread in distribution centers across their local markets. Fortunately, newspapers with different business models in emerging international economies still want presses, so good used printing equipment fetches more than salvage rates.
It still costs more per copy, above a fairly low press run threshold, to roll out periodicals on digital printers than high-speed offset printing presses. Those lines, however, cross at a higher press run threshold every year. As it stands, the digital process generates far less waste, offers far more configuration options (paper size, folding/binding, color) and allows more granular tailoring of the output right down to different contents in each copy.
Watch Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don’t know if it will work — Pacheco doesn’t either, I’d guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success.
Any such conversion becomes expensive for an incumbent local newspaper that owns “big iron” presses. In that case, you can’t just stop what you’re doing and sell the big presses, then use the money for the digital printers. Holding company CFOs probably would line up to remind me many companies cannot service current debt, let alone float more for the transition. Junk bonds, anyone?
I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco’s experiments and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press.
Of course, that approach presumes you have to buy the digital equipment outright. You don’t. Through direct leasing or partnerships with digital print shops (e.g., FedEx Office, nee Kinko’s, and its kind) you could try before you buy, or skip the buy step altogether until and unless it makes financial sense to own depreciable capital.
Customization: Digital printing allows much more granular customization of the printed products. “The Daily Me” becomes more tangible in print vs. just pointing locals to a me-too version of My Yahoo on the Web.
(Reminder: One time only, we’re stipulating that the future for print newspapers is not inextricably tied to interactive services, and focusing only on ways print might survive. If you think everything’s going online no matter what, this whole line of reasoning probably means nothing to you, and that’s OK. Thanks for stopping by, and please avail yourself of the 99 out of 100 posts here that focus on interactive media instead of print.)
I recommended print product customization years ago to cater to niche interests, but in broad strokes that seem crude by comparison to what we could do now. I did not presume at that point that we would decapitalize printing and shift to more nimble digital equipment. But at that time, though we all feared it, no one really forecast the steep slope of today’s decline in business fundamentals.
Frequency: Moving printing from a central facility to distributed digital presses means shorter transportation distances — in some cases, no transportation at all. Eventually digital printing could achieve a price point where it makes sense to replace dumb boxes at single copy points of sale with on-demand printers. People buying a paper at the nearest convenience store would always get an up-to-the-minute edition that way.
In that world, online represents instant plus archival information on demand; single copy represents the freshest news “snapshots” with print portability, fidelity and disposability; and home delivered print still represents the old tradeoff of doorstep convenience vs. information time lag. Even for old-school home delivery, you shorten the time lag by moving good-quality printing out closer to the customers. But I guess home delivery might not survive — might not need to — even if the rest of this digital printing franchise succeeds.
I wrote most of this post last night, then decided to sleep on it before posting. I’m glad I waited.
Newspaper industry executives soon will convene at MediaXChange, the newly coined uberconference and trade show put on by the Newspaper Association of America. I’m going, so I started receiving direct mail solicitations from vendors coming to this show a week or so ago. This morning, I received a vendor postcard that was obviously digitally printed, and customized with a headline and marketing copy that included my name several times.
Though the vendor’s products run a bit out of scope for my “day job,” the custom digital printing made me take notice. Print still has power when the beholder finds it relevant.
I would humbly suggest that executives in attendance at MediaXChange walk the floor hunting for ways to use this same approach for our own venerable direct-distribution products: printed newspapers. The adaptations I noodled through here may not be enough, or even in the correct direction, to save print. But print won’t last anyway as long as we’re chained to those expensive, depreciating, big-iron presses.
Digital printing is a great way to produce low-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant extremely low quality, but these days some of the digital presses can reach near offset quality if you know a few tricks. Here are just a few things to keep in mind when printing digitally.