Digital print vendors make strides, but will newspapers answer call?

By Don Piontek
Special to Newspapers & Technology

Over the past five years, digital print technology has expanded its turf dramatically.

In commercial print, book printing, direct mail and transactional printing, digital production is now considered an everyday technology.

And there’s more to come. By 2012, it’s estimated that digital printing will be approaching parity with offset printing as a component of the graphics universe.

The exception to this rule? Newspaper printing.


Photo: Screen

The Screen TruePress Jet 520, to be introduced at drupa, is capable of running full 4-color at speeds of up to 209 feet per minute.

Still mostly a web offset world, newspaper production has been little impacted by the digital print revolution. But this may change in the next year or two, thanks to the introduction of high-speed digital systems that boast increased quality, color and inline finishing.

Many major high-speed digital print systems have been introduced over the past year and there are more to come.

Most (not all) offer, or will offer, continuous-web inkjet printers with web speeds of up to 650 feet per minute and printable widths of more than 20 inches. For the most part, these machines print at a resolution of 600-by-600 dots per inch, and cover the process color gamut well.

Newspapers take a serious look

No chance of anyone mistaking their output for offset, but digital output has gotten quite good and it’s getting better all the time.

These new printers will prompt the newspaper community to take a serious look at digital, and the advantages it brings to their business.

One area drawing interest is the insert, or FSI, business.

The FSI business at major metro dailies was once controlled by the big food and retail chains that gravure-printed millions of flyers for mass distribution over a metro’s entire geographical area. That’s long gone.

Today, microzoning in the newspaper-packaging department and better targeting now permit targeted messages to be delivered close to each store’s “ground zero” radius.

As a result, long insert runs are now broken up into many zoned segments. Still, the FSI production process is wholly an offset one, with an average of six weeks of lead time between artwork and actual inserting. And of most firms using FSI advertising, the majority are still national big box food, retail and electronics chains such as Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart.

Valuable market untapped

This has left a valuable potential market untapped by the major metro dailies: The smaller mom-and-pop stores that would like to distribute close to their establishments’ radius. This is where digital could fill the gap. Picture a 500-foot-per-minute color inkjet press (or two) located in the packaging department, cranking out quality color, microzoned quantities of inserts on demand for smaller retailers.

Remember that such a press requires only a certified .PDF or PostScript file. No plates. Insert versions can run back-to-back with no downtime whatsoever for changeover. Insert orders could potentially be accepted up to a few days (or less) before the packaging operation began. A digital in-plant process would permit newspapers to offer insert distribution to this non-chain retail market with affordable production costs and selected distribution.

But let’s take this a bit further.

How about neighborhood-specific publications? A major metro area is not a homogenized geographic block. It’s composed of many neighborhoods, each with its own character.

Digital print could enable the creation of neighborhood-tailored publications that can be distributed quickly and cost efficiently. This technology could open up new markets for metro dailies. Papers as varied as the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post and Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel all print hyper-local weeklies tailored to particular neighborhoods or suburbs. Why not print these on digital systems instead of web offset machines?

More than inserts

Today’s high-speed digital printers can crank out complete publications and not just inserts.

Kodak, for example, in 2006 partnered with Swiss manufacturer Hunkeler to develop an integrated newspaper printing and cutting-sheeting-folding system that can pump out up to 1,000 40-page newspapers per hour.

The Kodak Versamark system has created great interest in Europe, and a few metro dailies in the United States have given it very serious consideration.

Editor’s note: Kodak will introduce a higher speed digital printer at this year’s drupa. The system will use the vendor’s Stream continuous inkjet technology and feature a thermal, drop-on-demand design.

Meantime, The New York Times is using continuous web printers from another digital press vendor, Oce, to produce its European editions.

The printed papers are distributed to newsstands at major European airports and cities each day.

By using digital technology, The Times is able to close its European edition much later than it would have had it used conventional web offset printing. The final layout is downloaded from the United States and the printers begin spinning up within minutes.

On-demand possibilities

How about a scenario where these digital printers are based at major U.S. airports such as O’Hare International in Chicago or Hartsfield in Atlanta?

RFID technology located in various airport newsstands could automatically transmit reprint alerts to the system, which would then proceed to print more copies. No more long truck trips in heavy traffic in order to deliver copies from the plant. Not only that, such a system could print the great majority of newspapers sold at the newsstands, thus increasing the digital printer’s utilization and efficiency.

High-speed continuous web digital print systems have found homes in a wide variety of applications that were formerly offset only.

Book printers use these systems to produce small orders, with runs as low as one or two books, on demand.

One such print-on-demand publisher, LaVergne, Tenn.-based Lightning Source Inc., uses its digital foundation to fill 19,000 book orders daily at an average of 1.9 unique books per order.

Transactional and financial services printers, meantime, are using the color capabilities of these printers to incorporate promotional messages into customers’ statements.

Potential customers see the output quality and speed capability and find lots of applications that can migrate to digital from offset. Although these digital presses aren’t cheap — some integrated systems can cost more than $3 million — newspapers should have no problems finding profitable niches or new business opportunities where high-speed digital print could be part of the solution.

All it takes is imagination.

Editor’s note: British manufacturer IBIS Bindery Systems Ltd. offers a high-speed folding, stitching, gluing and trimming system called the Smart-binder, which the vendor said is suited for many in-line digital newspaper applications.

Don Piontek is the Minneapolis-based U.S. representative for digital finishing systems manufacturer IBIS Bindery Systems. He can be reached at 952.937.5100 or via e-mail at finishingres@qwest.net.