Since 1992, the world has become familiar with Geoffrey Moore’s camel-hump “Chasm” diagram that eloquently describes how new technology innovations are diffused – unless they fall into the abyss shown during the ‘early adoption’ phase.
Last week, the story broke that News Limited is about to ‘cross the chasm’ with its first foray into digital newspaper production. It has taken this step by calling for tenders for the supply of its first all-digital newspaper production press and finishing system.
The significance of this move by News Ltd can not be overstated because it represents a move from a traditionally pragmatic industry – newspaper production – to become one of the ‘early adopters;’ albeit late in that sector of Moore’s Technology Adoption Lifecycle.
News’ opening gambit is designed to save over $1 million a year in air freighting southern newspaper titles up to Queensland. It is not ersatz web offset for mainstream production; digital presses are not fast enough for that – yet. However, further sites for the remote printing of otherwise air freighted newspapers and magazine inserts are on the radar.
A couple of years ago I presented a paper at the annual PANPA (now Newspaperworks) Future Forum where I hypothesized a national network of ten digital newspaper presses, all receiving PDF files from a central source but printing in every capital city of Australia (see powerpoint slide diagram). Admittedly over-ambitious, it aimed to demonstrate that digital newspaper printing in not a new way of doing the same old thing, but a way of re-inventing the printed newspaper.
Baby steps are always a good idea before undertaking a hurdle race, so it is entirely appropriate that News Ltd should first deploy digital press technology to print locally what was previously transported two or three thousand kilometers.
A WORLD OF DIGITALLY-PRINTED NEWSPAPERS
According to the latest Infotrends research “Inkjet in Newspapers” by Ralf Schlözer, available from: www.infotrends.com ; there are currently around 20 digital newspaper production sites in the world. If dual-purpose sites where transactional and direct mail houses also allocate time for some remote newspaper production, my own research indicates this figure is closer to 24.
None of these sites are owned or run by major newspaper groups, although they print titles from these groups. The largest network of digital newspaper sites in the world is owned by, or in joint ventures with, the UK’s Miller Newsprint, a subsidiary of Miller Group. Interestingly, Miller Group is a distributor first and newspaper printer second. Miller has dotted the Mediterranean with businesses that distributes batteries, shavers, kitchen appliances, suncreams, pens, confectionary – and newspapers. The main operation is on Malta, with other newspaper sites printing on either Kodak VL4200 or Screen Truepress Jet520 digital presses, in Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Italy. Over 60 international titles are distributed and printed to these sites, for expat buyers who often get their papers before London or Paris-based readers are awake.
The same ‘Day A’ principle applies in Dubai, where Atlas Printing Group serves a sizeable expatriate community across the UAE with international titles printed on a Screen Truepress Jet 520 and finished on Hunkeler equipment. Most of the 20-24 sites around the world use Hunkeler newspaper collating and finishing lines, with the two USA TKS sites finishing on TKS’s own inline systems.
The installed base consists of inkjet presses from Kodak, Screen, HP, TKS and Canon/Océ and these are spread around Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, USA, UK, France, Dubai, Reunion Isl., New Zealand and Germany. There is also a site in Japan at Yomiuri Newspapers, running a TKS Jetleader specifically to print the Wall Street Journal but this is TKS’s own machine. Australia has flirted with remote newspaper production before with mono electrophotographic web production at Sema, printing the Nikkei financial paper for the Japanese expat community, but this appears to have fallen by the wayside since Sema’s emergence from receivership. There is also some production of foreign titles using sheetfed digital machines with the pages collated and then stapled together.
In the same Infotrends report, Schlözer identifies that 57.1% of all newspaper titles printed digitally are ‘foreign’ titles to the place where they are printed. I am sure there are still some folks in Queensland who like to view Melbourne and Sydney papers as ‘foreign’ but the key is not actually nationality – it’s distance.
The cost of shipping ‘atoms’ of physical material continues to rise. The cost of shipping ‘bits’ of data continues to drop. This is perhaps the compelling reason why News Ltd has become the first major newspaper group in Australia soon to commit to full digital production at one of its sites.
Pragmatists no more, News Ltd is now an early adopter and there is plenty of upswing in Geoffrey Moore’s schematic before the peak is reached.
Once the installation is announced, it will mark a turning point, not just here in Australia, but globally for newspaper production. News did this once before in the 1980s, when colour on every page was pioneered at the Cairns Post in conjunction with manroland web. It will happen again with digital.