Digital Printing Strategies for 2015: What’s New, What’s Next?

By: Gretchen A. Peck

When the first generations of digital print engines came to market, there was a lot of excitement and speculation surrounding what it would all mean to publishing, how profound of an impact it would make on how books, magazines, newspapers and other types of ink-on-paper publications were made. The technologies back then were little more than amped-up office copier/printers, but they were quick to evolve and today’s digital print systems are much closer to rivaling offset. And digital printing has its unique and compelling attributes, too—attributes that newspaper organizations may soon find invaluable.

As a class of print technology, digital printing developed side-by-side with the Internet and electronic publishing. There were mixed messages for publishers to decode and priorities to sort out. For news organizations, it became a no-brainer to publish content to the Web, to create e-editions and have a presence on social media. That’s where the audience seemed to be going.

But at the same time, the print world has been undergoing a fast and furious era of innovation. Old iron-horse presses still do the bulk of the heavy lifting for newspaper publishers, but prepress has been completely overhauled to become all digital. And with the advent of production-capable digital print engines now, content can be digital all the way to the press.

Today, digital printing technologies are diverse—from toner-based systems to the newest classes of large-format equipment and high-speed inkjet Web presses. The resolutions have been upped, the images sharpened. Digital print systems are quick now and can be paired with in-line or near-line finishing technologies for folding, cutting, stacking and sorting. They’re highly efficient.

 

Hitting the Targets

One of the greatest benefits of digital printing has always been its ability to produce variable-data messages—transforming mass-produced print into a more personalized publication. Early on, back in the days when publishers, printers and prepress people gathered in conference rooms to talk about how profound digital printing’s impact may be, imaginations ran wild. There was talk about how every element on a page could be information precisely chosen for (or by) the reader.

That enthusiasm has since been tempered, and the industry pumped the breaks on how targeted print should be. There’s a fine line between what is personalized and what is creepy.

But digital presses are now pumping out the variable-data print, well and wisely, in the commercial print space. That print segment, along with what’s happening at newspaper publishers in Europe and Asia, is where U.S.-based news organizations can get a glimpse of their own futures with digital print.

Print is still the bread-and-butter of news organizations, according to Ron Sams, vice president of sales, manroland web systems, Inc. Though there’s been an obvious hurry to publish electronically, monetizing that content has proven a challenge. Print is likely to be the strongest revenue performer for years to come, he predicted.

High-speed inkjet Web presses are the latest innovations to class of digital technology piquing publishers’ interests.

In the large-format digital inkjet category, resolutions on digital inkjets offer photographic quality, and flatbeds enable direct-to-substrate printing a wide array of media, including “exotic” materials like wood, glass, or bamboo. Large-format inkjet printers may be of particularly interest to news organizations diversifying into events.

All categories of digital print engines have developed quickly; manufacturers have done an exceptional job at offering better, faster, less-expensive print. Though it’s unlikely that offset fades into oblivion anytime soon, digital print is offering a newspaper-production alternative for short-run publications.

“If you’re a newspaper of a significant size, it’s most likely that you’ve built enough volume among the titles that you’re printing, and that you have a decent workflow methodology that allows you to be as efficient as possible in terms of plate changes,” said Pat McGrew, evangelist for print, inkjet and production mail, Hewlett-Packard. “And think about all the amazing new plate technologies and prepress technologies that have come into the market even in the last five or six years. The ability to do short-run and not have the plate changes bankrupt you has changed the nature of offset printing. But that also makes it harder for those of us in the production digital side. To make a compelling case, we now have to look beyond the costs involved.”

Sams noted that a hybrid workflow—blending traditional offset presses with in-line digital inkjet heads—offers an entry-level path to personalized print.

“That inkjet head may have the ability to print a four-inch-wide band of information,” he said. “It can be text; it can be an image, but it’s printed at a running speed of 3,000-feet per minute. It is integrated into the offset workflow.”

Messaging could include special pricing, for example; the creative and marketing possibilities are limited only by one’s imagination. And targeted messages of this ilk should absolutely have some means of measuring the ad’s performance—a way to track the ad’s usage, such as a barcode or QR code, Sams said. It’s a powerful way to update static offset print, and to deliver performance data that advertisers are now accustomed to amassing via e-publishing.

Sams offered the example of a UK-based publisher, which has a lucrative single-copy sales business, but lacked insight into who was buying those newspapers. Using digital inkjet messaging, the publisher drives readers to its website, with free passes to access content otherwise locked down behind a paywall. It’s a way to not only attract those readers to the site, but also to gather insight about those readers, in order to market to them. The strategy has proven remarkably successful, according to Sams, who said the publisher reports as many as 150,000 readers have been converted to digital subscribers.

Gary Hall, senior director, plant operations at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, said that he’s been keeping tabs on the digital print market—keenly on the latest high-speed Web-fed inkjet devices—and though the news organization hasn’t yet made an investment of this kind, it almost assuredly will do so in the near future. He said that digital printing’s ability to customize print is most intriguing.

“You have opportunities to be edition-specific, address-specific, or advertising-specific, and you’re able to do that with very quick turnaround with digital printing,” he said.

“It also sparked our interest because it presents an opportunity for us to free up capacity on our offset presses. We have three KBA Commander offset presses that are of a pretty large scale, and considering the labor it takes to produce low-volume titles, they would probably work better on a digital press, as opposed to offset…The labor and consumable savings of moving some work from offset to a digital press is very appealing to us.”

 

Newspapers and More

McGrew noted that the European and Asian newspaper markets are thriving with projected growth on the rise rather than in decline. Offset presses are ubiquitous still, but digital print has begun to ingratiate itself into print and publishing circles there.

According to McGrew, a publisher in Belgium acquired a digital Web press and has grown a business of producing newspapers for expatriates. “The whole concept of ex-pat newspapers revolves around the idea that when people travel, they still want their hometown newspapers…Years ago, the only way to do that was to buy a copy that was flown to you,” she said. “In the interim now, it’s possible to read things online, but there’s still the tangible effect of newspapers.”

With its short-run and ultra-short-run sweet spot, digital printing is perfectly positioned to print these types of publications, and McGrew expects that more publishers and printers will partner to disseminate news in this way.

This same Hewlett-Packard customer in Belgium also has a contract with the European Union to print home-nation newspapers for its members. “Overnight, our customer receives the files from various publishers, prints them and delivers them to the members the next morning—the same way they’d be delivered at home. We have another customer in Italy that has a similar arrangement with Russian newspapers to print for a large group of Russian ex-pats living in northern Italy,” McGrew said. “The ex-pat story is one we’ve seen in Australia, in Asia and in Europe, but we don’t see that happening in the U.S. and it’s bizarre.”

The idea of using digital technologies to produce short-run publication and commercial print is starting to germinate here in the States, according to McGrew, who said that she recently worked with a publisher that had taken in commercial print customers in order to ensure the longevity of its three regional newspapers.

“They were using those same presses to produce high school and college newspapers, and also using their presses to produce inserts for other big dailies,” McGrew said.

“Once you have a digital press, what are the other business opportunities that present themselves to you—that walks and talks like a newspaper but isn’t a newspaper; it’s something else? Quite a few of our customers have been successful at selling the concept of something looks like a newspaper, but is actually marketing collateral,” McGrew added. She noted that another customer—a large European clothier is producing one-to-one newspaper-looking mailers with seven points of targeted personalization.

The campaign was a huge hit with young adults, McGrew said, and it was responsible for exponentially growing the brand’s loyalty program.

Hall said that publishers should absolutely be competing with commercial printers for work. “Here in Milwaukee we’re trying to do just that and become a leading regional print site.” The print department currently produces as many as 32 other titles for suburban communities, and those community-type papers have seen circulation declines just like the larger papers in the region. “We’ve seen a lot of those titles go down to as few as 600 copies,” he said, “and when you look at the opportunity that digital presents, it makes sense to move those smaller publications onto digital presses as opposed to the large offset lines.”

And there’s no shortage of “other than newspapers” types of print that publishers will be perfectly equipped to produce, manufacture, and even deliver—things like marketing collateral, print ads, inserts, catalogs, programmatic ad campaigns and custom publishing projects.

Whether they’re printing in-house or through a partner, Sams suggested that all news publishers should think about how to capitalize on one of their greatest assets—their reach. “Newspapers have great distribution networks, and to leverage that network is a natural extension of what they’ve done for years. They’ve distributed newspapers, magazines, catalogs—all kinds of things—to homes and businesses. I think that stepping out there and printing some of that stuff makes a heck of a lot of sense.”

There are formidable challenges ahead for news publishers. Advertising revenues have been halved from what they were just a decade ago, said Sams. Digital print will impact how media companies produce print in the very near future, he predicted: “The company that has good assets will print digitally, and the ones lack good assets are going to have to look for a partner that can print digitally.”

Though the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s recent year’s focus has been purposely on how best to publish in electronic platforms, print remains an integral part of its publishing mission.

“We’ve been fortunate in that at the corporate level, our executive leadership has been a strong believer in print,” Hall said.

Selling new print services is going to require some organizational change, more cooperative efforts between sales, editorial and production, Hall said: “How are you going to break down the traditional departmental lines and work together to generate revenue?”

That’s the first question publishers should be addressing, he suggested: “What is the vision? What is the future direction? What is the five-year strategic plan? And once that’s identified, then you can determine the resources and capital investments needed to meet those needs.”

McGrew recalled a colleague who’d once spoken about a lack of imagination being the highest hurdle for digital printing. “You have to put on the table in front of them what all the real possibilities are when it comes to leveraging the power of digital,” she said. “To look at what digital can do versus offset? There are so many opportunities, including micro-advertising and micro-segmentation—the Holy Grail of marketing.