Wednesday, October 1, 2008

4 questions with Duncan Newton


Newspapers & Technology continues its 4 Questions series aimed at digital press vendors. Duncan Newton, manager of business development for Océ North America, talks about Océ’s digital print offerings for newspapers.

How is Océ approaching newspapers and how do you see Océ fitting into this industry?

Océ has been in the newspaper business for a number of years, primarily in monochrome. With the launch of the JetStream family of six new high-speed, full-color, inkjet printers, the whole span of newspaper opportunities opened up. High speed, of course, means that these machines can meet tight deadlines. Full color will appeal to advertisers. Inkjet will deliver a much higher image quality than is normally associated with newspaper output — which should also appeal to advertisers. The fact that this is all digital means that the newspapers can be more narrowly focused. Ultimately they can be personalized and individualized. Local editions, weeklies, shopping guides all are prime opportunities.

According to Océ, what are the benefits of drop-on-demand vs. continuous inkjet technology for newspapers?

DOD vs. CIJ will make for many interesting discussions, but most of them will be pointless. The only vendor using CIJ is Kodak on their Versamark family. CIJ is a 30-year-old technology, which was developed for label printing. Because it is a continuously flowing stream of ink the heads and nozzles tend to wear out more quickly than DOD heads. Halftones and scanned images suffer greatly in CIJ because of its lack of precision. But we have seen new announcements from Kodak and others; machines will start to appear in a year or so. None of them use CIJ. Everything new is DOD. The DOD heads are faster, more accurate, have longer lifespans and are easier to maintain.

What trends do you see in digital printing for newspapers as far as news products, niche products, etc? What new technologies/features do you see emerging in digital presses that could potentially benefit newspapers?

There are four factors that make digital particularly well suited for newspapers. The size of the form, the speed of the machines, the ability to create individualized print runs and the ability to do full color. But caution should be exercised. The ability to individualize, distribute and deliver is limited by many factors and probably will not be applicable to the big papers for quite a long time.

This, however, leaves the door wide open for local editions of highly focused papers. These highly focused editions will make the perfect vehicle to revive sagging ad revenue. A paper like that can appeal to localized merchants. A local ice cream parlor would never advertise in a citywide paper, but probably would if the paper could target a 2-to-5-mile wide marketing circle. It is not unforeseeable that you could create your own version of the newspaper, too. By selecting your areas of interest a personalized paper could be sent to you on a weekly basis — along with ads from merchants who cater to those areas of interest.

The newspaper industry has been talking for many years about the potential benefits of digital printing. Is the technology really ready to deliver these benefits?

Had this question been asked even a year ago the answer would have to have been very heavily qualified, but that is no longer the case. The speed of the new inkjet printers makes it possible to actually meet the delivery schedules required by the industry. But the question isn’t whether or not the equipment is ready; it’s more is the industry ready? Too many of the established publishers are working with antiquated marketing techniques. They are not ready to take advantage of the possibilities that would be created by going digital. Ink on paper is easy. Delivering it on the doorstep is an entirely different matter. The publishers have not invested in the kinds of information-rich database management technology that will be required to create individualized, localized editions of specialized papers. And those are the main reasons for adopting digital technology.