Newspaper Beat: Watching Printing Boundaries Blur At Graph Expo

By: Mark Fitzgerald Graph Expo has always been an equipment show for commercial printers, and through the 1990s the small number of vendors and attendees from the newspaper side of printing seemed to fall off to nothing.

Some years it seemed as if the only newspaper presence was the name of Chicago convention center where it is held annually: McCormick Place, honoring the legendary Chicago Tribune editor and publisher, Col. Robert R. McCormick.

But at this year's show, which ends today, there was a noticeable increase in the attention vendors were paying to the newspaper industry -- a change that reflects the fading differences between newspaper manufacturing and commercial printing.

Two forces accelerating this blurring between newspaper and commercial printing are both strikingly present at this year's Graph Expo: new technologies that can easily be adapted for the local Sir Speedy quick-print shop or The Wall Street Journal -- and an economic imperative that has newspaper publishers and commercial printers trying to get into the other guys' business.

"You see newspapers doing commercial work, and commercial printers wanting to get back into newspaper work ... or wanting to get into contract packaging" for newspapers, said Troy Anderson, product manager for Creo Inc.'s Staccato screening technology.

Monday, Anderson was manning a booth boldly labeled "Newspapers" inside the sprawling Creo exhibit. He said he was pleasantly surprised by the number of production people from newspapers who had dropped by the in the past couple of days. "Everybody said there wouldn't be anybody from newspapers here, but that's not how it's been," he said.

Until fairly recently, commercial printers and newspaper publishers looked for very different things from printing iron and software because they ran very different businesses. Commercial printers worked in a cycle of discrete "jobs" of short press runs. A quick turnaround between jobs was essential. Newspapers, on the other hand, needed equipment durable enough for their long press runs.

Nowadays, commercial printers still emphasize speed and even shorter runs -- but so do newspapers. Publishers are spinning off so many niche publications with shorter press runs than their core product -- Spanish-language papers, high-end magazine-style pubs, youth-oriented tabloids -- that quick make-ready and fast turnaround are critical. At the same time, production of the core newspaper itself increasingly resembles a series of short-run jobs as publishers add more and smaller zones and editions.

Commercial printers, too, are taking on newspaper work as publishers decide to get out of the manufacturing business. In Canada, for instance, Transcontinental prints 160 papers, including 19 dailies. Transcontinental owns many of those papers, but it also is the contract printer for both national papers -- and it recently took over all printing operations for Le Presse in Montreal.

Some of the newspaper people at Graph Expo are doing the same thing in the United States. Randy Leonard, for instance, was shopping for a new platemaker for Western Oregon Web Press, an Albany, Ore., business that prints several newspapers. Leonard and his brother were taking a close look at Glunz & Jensen's PlateWriter 4200, which images CTP (computer-to-plate) plates using a technology that at first seems miles away from newspaper printing: an inkjet.

G&J is definitely targeting the newspaper market -- especially smaller-circulation papers -- with the platemaker, which uses a chemical-free processing that can be performed in full daylight conditions, said Hank Clifford, the company's U.S. vice president for sales and marketing. (See related E&P Online article.)

The 4200 lists for $35,000, a price considerably cheaper than other so-called "process-free" or "chemical-free" platemakers. Clifford ascribes that lower price to the use of the mass-produced inkjet device. "We're the recipient of the millions and dollars that Roland, HP (Hewlett-Packard) and the rest are spending on inkjet," he said.

In the same way, the newspaper industry is already, or soon will be, reaping the benefits of the advancements in commercial printing.

One of the most obvious examples is the implementation of JDF, the vendor-independent workflow automation standard that has become so ubiquitous so quickly that no one on the commercial side bothers anymore to refer to its full name, Job Definition Format. JDF is the critical component to achieving a common goal of both commercial printers and newspaper publishers: computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). JDF is, in effect, a bridge between the islands of automation that grew up as the printing industry fitfully moved to a digitally controlled workflow. (The June 2004 issue of E&P includes a long article on JDF and newspapers.)

CIP4, the international consortium of vendors promoting JDF, sponsored a separate pavilion of such JDF-enabled product and service providers as Vio Worldwide, the workflow software company, and Prism, which provides press monitoring and other management information software (MIS) solutions.

CIP4 -- which stands for... never mind, that's enough acronyms for now -- also sponsored four separate tours of the show floor to highlight JDF-enabled vendor wares in front-end, prepress, MIS, and press and postpress. There are so many vendors enabling JDF these days that each one of these guided excursions is, like the ill-fated Minnow cruise on "Gilligan's Island," a three-hour tour.

On the prepress tour, nearly every stop included vendors whose product could have immediate application to newspapers. At the Dynagram booth, for instance, engineer Marie-Christine Brutus [demonstrated DynaStrip, software that uses JDF to automate the headache-inducing task of imposition. Brutus said Dynagram didn't have to change any nomenclature to attract newspaper customers. "Because it involves impositioning, by its very nature, it's the same newspaper or commercial," she said. DynaStrip is already in use at The Wall Street Journal and Transcontinental, the publisher and contract printer for Canadian newspapers, Dynagram said.

And by its very nature, there's another reason JDF links the commercial printing business with the newspaper publishing business, noted Freddy Pieters, product manager for commercial printing workflow at Gent, Belgium-based Esko-Graphics. "To me," he said, "JDF is all about reducing costs."