Two countries, one customer ... let's get it together: Print 21 magazine article

Derek Fretwell's article in the last issue of Print 21 struck a chord with many in the industry who recognise that printing is changing faster than the awards system by which we recognise excellence. This time, he goes further and suggests that now is the time to bring Australia and New Zealand closer together and treat print like it really is – a single market.

One of the strange things about writing for a periodical is the distance in time between authorship and readership reaction. I write this shortly after publication of my last column on the NZ Pride in Print awards, before the awards themselves and after the Australian equivalent, the National Print Awards.

I have discovered I am not alone. There are others amongst you who also believe that we are producers of products. That the effectiveness or otherwise of the products we produce is what should be recognised, honoured and awarded rather than the integrity of the processes used to produce them. I am not the only one who notices the lack of awards for things like block making, letterpress printing, hand engraving and other processes that have passed any business reason for continuing use, despite the craft used to produce them. Others also wonder what will happen when sheetfed offset, four or more colours, bound by any method, is no longer the preferred method of production for so many printed products.

There are even suggestions that as an industry we should be honouring not craftsmanship but business management. That it is pointless producing the perfect web offset, heatset, more than 64 pages publication, when the business is going broke doing so. Some suggest that the best printer, any process, is the most profitable one. There is merit in the argument.

Some wonder how long it will be before the real action is at the Australasian Awards for Graphic Communication. Where web products like nzgirl compete head-to head with printed products like New Zealand (or Australian) Women's Weekly. Far-fetched perhaps, but the point is well made that graphic communication is no longer the exclusive reserve of print. Is there not also a warning bell here for publishers considering investing large amounts of capital into processes they believe they understand but are subject to forces far beyond the cost of print? I believe so.

There is a definite line in the age demographic where the shift from the traditional 'lean back' audience becomes the new 'lean forward'. In New Zealand this shift is currently at 18 years and moving up annually. To express this another way, a 19-year-old still buys magazines, an 18-year-old probably does not. Anyone in web publishing is well aware of this, anyone in print publishing worries about it.

Sink or swim across the ditch
Shortly before sitting at this blank page, the Blue Star Print Group acquisition of Spectrum Print in the southern part of these shaky isles became public. This follows hard on the heels of the same conglomerate's acquisition of Panprint in our northern regions. Recently the Geon super plant in Auckland was officially opened by our beloved prime minister. As I understand it, this site absorbs the previous Brebner Auckland and Business Print sites.

There are few significant A1 sheetfed printers in New Zealand that are still independent of the consolidation process wrought by these two organisations. Most packaging printers also now operate on an Australasian basis and apart from several fierce independents practically all our printed newspapers and magazines are now trans-Tasman owned and managed.

This is a good thing, it continues the consolidation process of an industry still incredibly relevant but becoming inexorably smaller on a worldwide basis.

What has this to do with Print Awards in Australia and New Zealand you may well ask?

Well, it is my assertion that the changes and consolidations of the printing industry, the increasingly regional nature of the businesses of Australasian graphic communication are not reflected in the organisations that represent them. Further, that both the New Zealand Pride in Print awards and the Australian National Print Awards are symptomatic of this fact.

The super printers, super packagers and super suppliers to our little bit of heaven have already moved to recognise the market reality that we largely sink or swim together. We are rapidly becoming two nations with one printing industry. Differences exist on both sides of the ditch and are significant but the real enemy is without, in Greater Asia, China and, more particularly, cyberspace. If we cannot maintain the relevancy of printed graphic communications, we will lose more and more market space to electronic graphic communications.

Just as an aside, I have not read the full New Zealand China free trade agreement but I doubt that it was designed to provide protection from competition for our (or Australian) printing companies. Like it or not, our ANZ super printers of all processes will face increased competition from the communists. The workers heaven, of course, does not concern itself too much with annoying things like pollution, employee health or wage rates so they have a slight edge.

We have been here before. There was a time when the cheapest products available came from the first 'Asian Tiger', Japan. They too suffered the problems of shoddy manufacturing and some of you may remember the many jokes about Japanese watches, cars, food and printing. Now the most expensive place on the planet to have an A4 page produced is Tokyo and the Nippon printers worry about the growing dominance of China.

All touched by ink
So to the print awards and our competition with electronic graphic communications.
I have just spent several months in the very peculiar world of web publishing (always talk to the enemy) and I believe that printed information will less and less satisfy the demands of the lean forward audience. Printers of publishers' products of all varieties have a generational challenge to overcome which far exceeds the process questions of sheetfed or web, offset or digital.

But the one great advantage that PGC has over EGC, (work it out!) is that we actually manufacture things. Things you can hold in your hand, open and eat, read in the bath, wipe the bench with, start fires with, squeeze, smell or taste. We make products, and as a colleague once pointed out to me "ink touches all our lives". From the time you rise in the morning to when you retire almost everything you touch, smell, taste or look at is covered or protected with a layer of ink, and that ink was put there by one of us.

Electronic graphic communications doesn't make a damn thing.

That's another reason why I advocate the switch to product-based awards. Physical products are our biggest advantage over our biggest competitor. Let's celebrate the excellence of something that cannot be replicated and enjoin all manufacturers of print to celebrate with us. It doesn't matter if the best periodical publication in the whole of ANZ next year was produced by electrocoagulation or heatset web just so long as it was not an 'internet magazine'. But then I've said all this in the last issue.

Best of both worlds
In recent times we have seen the very laudable efforts of both New Zealand and Australian organisations to promote print. Acting separately, for we are two countries, both Print NZ and the Printing Industries Association of Australia have produced promotional materials for the industry. Soon both of those organisations will also heed the undeniable logic of the argument and reform both the Australian National Print Awards and the New Zealand Pride in Print awards.

The opportunity will therefore arise to align the two sets of awards for the greater good of the industry. Note I said "two sets of awards". I am not advocating an ANZ awards or the subjugation of the New Zealand industry to its bigger neighbour. We have already seen how market forces will sort that out. What I am suggesting is the same set of entry and judging criteria be adopted for the respective awards. That the trans-Tasman nature of the industry would be well-served if the awards in New Zealand mirrored the awards in Australia or vice versa.

I believe that the trans-Tasman packagers would prefer it if 'best box' in New Zealand meant exactly the same thing as 'best box' in Australia. More importantly, I am certain that their customers would also. The same can be said of all the products we produce. Let's stop worrying about whether it's printing boys but not as we know it, and celebrate the function and let's do it to the same standards together.

This, of course, would require both will and cooperation. These are attributes that are not unknown between our two countries and our one industry as I suggested previously. In any event, it will not be long before work in our two countries may share production. Printed in Auckland and bound in Perth is just around the corner and may be already happening. Recognising excellence on both side of the ditch by the same criteria would allow the customer of our industry to enter that job where he resides, be it Auckland or Perth.

Both of the Australian and New Zealand premier awards for excellence in printing are falling behind the reality of what printing is today. The concentration on process is flawed because the processes are changing quickly and irrevocably in response to new technologies and new competitors. Let's change the awards to go beyond process to products and let's do it together.