Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 3 May 2011

It’s déjà vu, not a manifesto! writes Mark Reid in response to James Cryer’s commentary, while another reader offers their thoughts on how green the industry is.

Re: Print has an exciting story to tell … why is no one telling it? asks James Cryer

James Cryer’s article is more like a rambling dose of déjà vu than a manifesto. It raises a smorgasbord of familiar issues about the print industry, and even more familiar suggestions about how to deal with them.

And why suggest an industry debate about the proposed carbon tax is unusual? Printers everywhere talk about matters outside the industry’s usual purview, all the time. It’s perhaps a little condescending to suggest otherwise.

The implication that printing has severed its ties to the real world is curious. Every printer knows the industry is stuck in a very real world. It's a tough world where you struggle to remain profitable, or even just preserve equity, while technology renders paper-based media less relevant (not irrelevant). It’s the real world where an increasing oversupply ratchets up the pressure on everyone. If as James suggests, printing is about creating content, printers could just create more of it to keep busy. But it is customers (those pesky agencies, publishers, mail houses, manufacturers and so forth) that create content for us and there aren’t enough of them. Without content what is there to print?

Maybe it hasn’t occurred to James that the environment, school leavers, apprenticeship training are the same dog’s breakfast the every manufacturer – not just printers – deals with all the time. (Oh – I think a sovereign wealth fund is great idea when we recover some wealth to add to it!)

Like James, I look forward to seeing the newly structured PIAA board raise the industry’s profile. Let’s hope it attracts the attention of the press as well as clients, school leavers, and more than a sprinkling of new investors. (A tweet-wielding media savvy press relations person and relocation to Canberra might be useful first steps …)

As for those extravagant back-slapping events, some external promotion would be useful, but any chance to get together with industry colleagues is valuable in itself.

It’s a useful place to see familiar faces and talk about familiar issues and familiar solutions to familiar problems.

Mark Reid

I am all for apprenticeship training and promoting the printing industry however, it is difficult to glorify our industry with the current apprenticeship wages and even the pay rates some qualified adults receive in this ever competitive digital world. Let’s face it, attractive remuneration attracts employees and self promotes industries.

Vick Tsaccounis

Thanks James, a positive view and thought-provoking.
Bruce Sinnott