Digital printing is making inroads everywhere, with newspapers now a key target market for Oce’s new high speed colour inkjet printer, says its global marketing manager Michaela Frisch
That the newspaper industry is in a state of flux no-one can deny. In the industrialised world circulations of traditional newspapers are at best flat, there are exceptions. The celebrity obsessed afternoon metro free papers are booming, but for the established players there is not much to smile about. The internet is proving a huge challenge, both in taking away the rivers of gold classified advertising, and in providing the primary location of the younger generation to get their information rather than newsprint. Newspaper publishers the world over are wrestling with actually making money from the internet, and indeed if they had to pay for the content, rather than repurpose content generated from the salaries of their hard copy journalists they would all be bust by now.It was to this audience of furrowed brows that Océ’s global digital newspaper head Michaela Frisch dropped into Australia to present at the Panpa conference, with a title of ‘Digital – the future of newspapers’, and caused a stir among the region’s newspaper publishers.
The stir came first with the samples that Frisch brought with her, 1000 copies of the Sydney Morning Herald that Océ had printed at drupa on its Jetstream digital inkjet colour press. To say that those of us at drupa had been surprised when we were handed copies of that day’s SMH in Dusseldorf would be an understatement, the quality of print was remarkable, and the executives gathered at Jupiters were similarly taken aback when handed copies of Jetstream’s output.
All the new digital high speed inkjet vendors at drupa – and there were plenty of them – had newspapers as one of their initial target markets, along with direct mail, transpromo and books.
Océ of course is no stranger to digital newspapers. It has been running its DNN – digital newspaper network – since the turn of the century. This links in newspaper publishers with printers running Océ presses in various locations such as Sydney, London, Johannesburg, LA. The publishers, which include various national dailies, send their papers digitally from base to the remote printer, which prints and distributes. A typical example would be the SMH, which sends its papers to the printer in LA, who then prints and then puts them on Qantas planes bound back to these sunny shores. However DNN is quite a different business model to that forseen by Océ and the others for the new breed of inkjet printers.
Michaela Frisch says there are three main business models that Océ believes Jetstream will facilitate. She says, “The functionality and price performance of Océ Jetstream lends itself perfectly to the distribute and print model. Secondly there is the Special Editions and third the micro marketing.”
The distribute and print model is one that for Australia at least with its huge distances looks especially ripe for exploitation. Océ’s plan is to have one of its digital inkjet presses in a regional centre, and for the newspaper publisher to send up digital files. The Jetstream would then print for that town / region. The publisher would save a fortune in freight costs, which in these days of rapidly rising fuel is important, and would save an equal amount of time, pushing back sales and editorial deadlines, so making the paper more competitive. Océ already has a customer in Switzerland doing this, its distances are nothing like Australia of course, but the proposition has still found acceptance with at least one publisher there.
The second business model is special editions. Frisch cites the example of one publisher in Germany already doing this, Handelsblatt News Am Abend. Handelsblatt is Germany’s biggest financial paper, the equivalent of the AFR here. Its main issue, with a circulation of around 200,000 comes out each morning, but the paper also prints, on Océ printers, an afternoon issue, aimed at business travellers boarding planes and trains. Editorial and sales close at 2pm, and the afternoon edition is printed and in location by 4pm in 30 different locations, having been printed by 14 different presses around Germany,
each producing around 1500 copies, giving a daily total of 20,000, or 100,000 a week.
The third business model is micro marketing, where digital presses are used to produce very small print runs, to produce genuinely local newspapers, which again is where newsprint publishers can score over newer media. One publisher in Chicago for instance is using the local populace to file their own stories, with journalists filtering and formatting them, then the digital press prints runs of a couple of thousand for that suburb. Doesn’t sound much but when you multiply by the 80 main suburbs in Chicago all of a sudden that is 150,000 extremely local newspapers. Micromarketing can also mean segmented demographics - women, the young, the elderly, the rich etc etc. This may also include printing ethnic language versions of the main edition. Frisch says this is exactly what the Arizona Republic started doing, and as a result saw its market share shoot up from 50 per cent to 80 per cent in less than two years.
Frisch says that the landscape for newspapers is changing to include new opportunities for short run printing, to those publishers that are open to new ideas. Océ is particularly well placed to meet those needs, especially with the new Jetstream, which will be able to produce in full colour what Océ’s existing technologies produce in monochrome, and at high speed.
It will be interesting to see how far the digital uptake goes in the next few years, but what is certain is that there will be an impact.
