Inky fingers - Josh Brooks writes on print

Flicking through this week’s PrintWeek, it struck me that despite our industry struggling in some areas, there is such a lot for us to be proud of.

Take Wapping, where I was lucky enough to spend last Saturday night watching the last-ever print run. It was, as Adam Hooker writes in today’s magazine, an emotional evening. But the story of Wapping, and in particular the recent investment by News International in its brand new print plants, reminds us that printing in the UK is an enormously important industry. For those readers in smaller companies or who are feeling the daily grind getting to them, it’s not a bad thing to remember that they are part of something special.

Equally, Helen Morris’s story on page 4 of today’s magazine highlights supermarket giant Asda’s decision to launch a big new catalogue. Anyone who thought the internet would dominate home shopping by 2008 was clearly wrong; on the contrary, the big supermarkets are falling over themselves to put ink on paper.

Then there’s Vinalith, the firm in Kent which has produced a wonderful 3D front cover for the film magazine Empire. We’ve seen an advance copy and it really is something special. And, as far as we know, it’s a world first, which is even better.

Finally, congratulations are due to Leach Colour and the Pureprint Group, who have both received Queens Awards for Enterprise. A few printers and suppliers are named in this every year, but it’s a great fillip to the industry to know that print is not invisible to the outside world.

So in spite of the industry’s occasional difficulties, don’t despair – remember that we’re all part of something exciting and there really is a lot to celebrate.

Print doesn’t often get the public recognition it deserves (except, of course, in PrintWeek). But Stephen Fry’s passionate documentary on Gutenberg’s press on Monday night brought some of that recognition, and was a great reminder of why what we do is so important.

In the documentary, Fry told the story – at least, as far as we know it – if how Johannes Gutenberg came to develop the moveable type press that made him famous. Many of us will know the story already of Gutenberg’s formative years in the bankrupt city of Mainz, before he moved to Strasbourg and found finance to develop his big idea of the press. Not least, the sad outcome that Gutenberg lost his invention to his financier and ended up being supported through his old age by the citizens of Mainz (if my memory serves).

But most remarkable about the documentary was Fry’s delight and real excitement at discovering how printing came about, and its importance to the world we live in. He describes printing as the most important invention since the wheel and the very bedrock of our society. And he’s right. Print has changed the world in the last half century and has led to the Renaissance, democracy and education – far beyond the wildest imaginings of Gutenberg’s venture, I’m sure.

Here’s the link to BBC’s iPlayer where you can still watch the programme, although only for a couple more days. If you missed Monday, watch this before it’s too late.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009wynj.shtml?filter=txdate%3A14-04&filter=txslot%3Aevening&start=1&scope=iplayerlast7days&version_pid=b009z5vp

Epaper has been seen by some as the biggest threat to print since the internet was launched (although, to be honest, that hasn't turned out to be much of a threat at all). As discussed in today's PrintWeek (17 April 2008), the world's biggest publishers are moving to releasing titles in ebook format at the same time as the printed edition, while newspaper publishers are also exploring the possibilities of the medium.

News agency Reuters has posted a short video on epaper - follow the link here to watch it.

http://uk.reuters.com/news/video?rpc=401&videoId=80497&feedType=VideoRSS&feedName=Environment&rpc=401

I only came into the print industry four years ago and it is one of my great regrets that I will never have seen or heard the great clatter and commotion of newspaper printing on Fleet Street.

So I was delighted last week to spend a couple of hours with a contact in the newspaper business who had worked in the Street of Shame – albeit briefly – in the last days before the newspaper industry decamped to Docklands.

I want to share just one of the stories the newspaperman told me. Albeit second hand, it gives an idea of the eccentricity of Fleet Street in its glory days, and why Rupert Murdoch and the other press barons were so exasperated with it.

It goes something like this. On weekend shifts, the printers would be paid in cash at the end of the shifts by a clerk from the newspaper’s accounts department, who would himself have had to come into the office early on a Sunday morning to hand out the little brown envelopes in an upstairs room.

One day in the early 1980’s, a young clerk was handing out the wages and ticking off names on the register. One worker, arriving at the front of the queue, said he was picking up the pay for himself and other worker, Willie Croxson.

“You can’t,” said the young clerk, on his first weekend shift.

“Why not? I always pick up Willie’s pay,” retorted the printer.

“Maybe you do, but he’ll have to come up and pick it up himself.”

“Pick it up himself? You must be joking.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he can’t climb the stairs to get up here,” said the printer.

“What?”

“Yeah. He’s 78.”

It turns out that in the glory days of Fleet Street, as well as the printers who would produce the papers, a group of old boys (they were surely invariably old boys at that time) would come in and sit around in the print works for a few hours just to pick up the pay check.

Of course, it would never be tolerated today, in this age where accountants rule the world. But who cares? Working in Fleet Street sounds like a blast.

Public sector tendering has a somewhat mixed reputation in the industry. On one hand, it provides work and, depending on the framework or contract in question, kudos for those who are selected. But by all accounts the process can be a nightmare, with hugely complex pre-qualification questionnaires and demands for documents or mission statements that are relevant to no-one but the biggest companies.

This week's launch of a tender process for the Department for Children, Scheels and Families therefore obviously caught my eye. The department is, as we report today, looking for a consortium of printers, or a single big printer, or a print management company, to provide a full range of print for the next eight years. The department spends around £17m on print every year already - this could go up or down during the life of the contract.

None of this makes life easy for the SME printer. Few would be big enough themselves to get involved in a consortium with the scale to challenge for a tender like this. SMEs may get some work through print management companies, should one of them win this tender. But I suspect that this will be another tender process which excludes the little guy.

That said, the DCSF's thinking is logical - as a department, it wants a single access point to its print supplier, which through streamlining the procurement process will reduce costs and, presumably, increase speed of turnaround. It's interesting to note that this single point of contact is exactly what many of the big print groups, such as Adare and St Ives, have been working hard to create over the last couple of years. This is obviously what the big clients want.

It's surprising, too, that the DCSF has opted not to use the pan-government print framework that was set up last year, with some fanfare, by the Office of Government Commerce. The reason given was that the DCSF felt the OGC's framework didn't provide the necessary scope of services. This may be true, but I wonder if the point about the single contact point for the client was a more important factor.

I find it hard to imagine this work going to anyone other than a print management company, and one of the big ones at that. That's not necessarily a bad thing (although I know there are some pretty strong view points for and against in the industry). In these cut-throat times, it's hard to see a real consortium of printers coming together to bid for this work. But, as always, I'm prepared to be proved wrong. And if a group of independent print firms got together and won this contract, it would be a great positive news story for the industry.

I couldn't help being gripped - and horrified - by a story of murder and suicide that turned up this morning about two press operators in India who have both died in the tragic conclusion of what appears to be a years-old family feud.

According to a report on newindpress.com, one of the printers, 29-year-old Srinivasan is believed to have murdered his brother-in-law, 45-year-old Ramalingam, in the printing factory in Teynampet, near Chennai, where they worked. Ramalingam was found yesterday morning in the factory with his throat cut and Srinivasan had hanged himself.

The two worked on the same press and, according to the factory's owner, they quarreled often. Police are working on the assumption that Ramalingam was killed by his brother-in-law who then hanged himself when he was overcome by guilt.

For the full story, visit http://www.newindpress.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=IE920080324234011&Page=9&Title=Chennai&Topic=0&

PrintWeek visited News International’s new print plant at Broxbourne months ago, but it has been all over the news in the last week or so after it ran an open day for national newspaper journalists.

The best coverage of it so far has come from The Guardian and its well-respected media commentator, Roy Greenslade, who shot an excellent video of the plant in action. So for all of you desperate for a look inside the UK’s biggest print plant – and at those legendary triple-width MAN Roland presses – here’s a link to that video. Enjoy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/17/pressandpublishing.rupertmurdoch

We hear very little from workers who are made redundant, but a heart-warming story has turned up of two former press operators who lost their jobs in New Jarrold Printing’s dramatic collapse in 2006.

According to the Norwich Evening News, Les Britcher and Jamie Spring have found new jobs in print by moving to the sunny climes of Dubai to train a team of Indian and Filipino immigrant workers there on how to use a Komori System38 press.

But not only have they moved to the fast-growing Middle Eastern city – they have followed the very press that they ran at New Jarrold Printing, which had been bought in 1999. After the closure of NJP, the press was bought by Zabeel Printing Press, a company in the United Arab Emirates, which last year advertised for operators.

Britcher told the paper: “I didn’t think I would ever see the press again, and when the advert appeared in the paper my response was to apply for it immediately. To a certain degree I feel an emotional attachment to the machine.”

Spring added that working on the press now is “as if we’ve never been away from it”.

If you have a story about what you’ve done since leaving the print industry, let us know in the space below.

For the full story, click here.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Japan a couple of weeks ago by Apex Digital Graphics to witness the worldwide launch of Ryobi’s venture into the B1 market, the 1050 press.

Plenty will be written, I’m sure, about that machine both in PrintWeek’s pages and elsewhere in the run-up to Drupa. But today I want to share some impressions about Ryobi’s press manufacturing set-up.

For one thing, there is a timing device which measures how long it takes workers to walk 10 metres – 6 seconds is the aim. Our guide around the factory told the gathered print industry journalists and potential customers that this was designed to keep employees’ pace up as they walked around the site – a novel concept, and it seemed to work. I wonder what the unions would say about it in this country?

Second was the precision of the line manufacturing the press units. Each unit is built in seven separate stages, with one or two people responsible for each stage of the process. Each stage takes a maximum of 75 minutes – a prominent clock counts down how much time is left before the unit will be picked up and moved on. There is little room for error on the part of the workers; but, apparently without fail, a unit rolls off the production every one and a quarter hours.

But most striking of all was the absolute cleanliness of the factory – you could, to use an awful cliché, eat your dinner off the floor. I have only visited one other press manufacturing plant, which was somewhat more cluttered, and I suspect that few are as spotless as Ryobi’s. What I can say is that very few printers I have visited have been as meticulously clean as Ryobi’s factory.

I’m not saying that Ryobi’s press is better than any others in the market because of its clean factory. But I do think that attention to detail on the factory floor and the sort of clearly defined workflows that Ryobi’s plant exemplifies can only be good for business.

A workplace where everyone has clearly defined goals and takes real pride in their job and working environment is, I believe, indicative of a well-run company. And that, as we all know, means a healthy bottom line.

This week’s news that paper prices are rising again was accompanied by the almost inevitable refrain that mills’ production costs have gone up. Everyone is facing increasing costs, be they mills, merchants or printers. But who takes the hit? I can’t help but assume that it’s the guy running the printing press.

It’s all very well for mills to blame higher prices for the rise in costs. But we mustn’t forget that most of the European mills have also been running a deliberate policy of closing down capacity in order to tighten supply and push up prices. That’s not a bad strategy in itself. (In fact, it’s one that print as a whole would do well to adopt, were it not for the fact that it would mean small companies closing themselves down. Unless they sell up, no-one will do that voluntarily.)

While the paper industry is having a tough time of it, it’s a bit rich to blame input costs alone when the sector is doing all it can to push prices up through mill closures. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t put prices up. But I do think they could be more transparent about why this is happening, especially given the paper manufacturing sector’s lamentable record on collusion over pricing.

We’d be interested to hear from our readers both in the print and paper industries about how you are dealing with paper price increases. Is it possible to pass rises on? How are end users reacting? Who is taking the hit? Let us know in the space below.

I've spent most of this week sitting in a large conference room on the banks of the Rhine listening to various kit manufacturers making grand statements about the future of print and their part in it. As of Thursday morning, there has been limited news, sadly, on product launches for Drupa, although with more than four months still to go before the show I can understand the companies' reticence.

But the overwhelming message at this pre-show press conference has been that digital print, especially personalisation, are the way of the future. Domino talked about the possibility of personalising newspapers with its the latest addition to its Bitjet range; Screen, Ricoh and others talked about transpromo and a number of other personalisation applications and how they will change the world.

I can't disagree that my response will be much better if I recieve a piece of direct mail, or a magazine, newspaper or bank statement which caters to my preferences and talks to me on a quasi-personal level. But there's a problem to which I haven't yet found a satisfactory answer: where does the data come from?

If your clients are banks, for instance, then they'll probably have a lot of information to hand. But if it's a smallish design agency, how much useful data will they have on hand about their own clients' customers? Probably not much.

So selling personalisation software and variable data-capable kit to printers is all very well. But it seems to me that a huge expertise is required in addition to all this. If you're, say, a B2 jobbing printer and looking to get into personalised print, where do you get the data from? Would the majority (or any) of your clients have good enough information on their clients that they could just hand it over to you? If not, it's then necessary to get data specialists involved. It's a huge investment for anyone to make speculatively.

In the current era of kit manufacturers setting themselves up as business consultants and strategy gurus, I think the onus is on the Screens, Xeroxes, Oces and others to help the smaller customers they're targeting get into this market. If they want to sell the kit, they should do all they can to help their customers make that business work - including going to the print buyers to explain what their technology can do.

I'm sure that variable data is the way forward, but there's a lot more to making a success of it than just kit and software.

Yesterday I took part in a very interesting discussion on print management with some of the top people in the sector. The write-up will appear in PrintWeek on 24 January, but in the meantime I wanted to share with you one of the dilemmas to come out of the meeting: what the heck do we call print management these days?

Everyone in the room agreed that the term was basically no longer appropriate to what the companies we’ve traditionally described as print management firms actually do. Beyond your basic print broking – which some companies do still seem to make some cash out of – the range of activities is staggering. These include campaign management, creative work, document management, customer communications management, data handling, facilities management and a lot more.

Nevertheless, from a printer’s point of view, there certainly exists a group of companies whose common characteristic is that they procure print on behalf of a third party. But apart from that, can we really compare, say, massive companies like Williams Lea or RR Donnelley Global Document Solutions with smaller firms who are, basically, print brokers?

So I put it to the industry: does print management as a concept still exist? If so, should we carry on calling it that? If not, what should we call it? Answers on a postcard – or, preferably, below…

Print and its associated industries have been characterised in the last few years by a series of races: the race for speed in the digital market; the race online in the publishing market; and the race for colour in the newspaper market.

The latter has proved, in my eyes at least, to be the biggest race of all. (It has certainly been the most expensive). Like many a Tour de France, one of the competitors was way out in front of the competition: The Guardian, which became the first full-colour national newspaper way back in September 2005 when its Berliner format presses went live at Trafford Park in Manchester and the Guardian Print Centre in east London.

Now, with 2008 all but upon us, the peloton is in a final sprint towards the full-colour finishing line. Trinity Mirror, we hear this week, has completed its Watford installation and is now able to print full-colour – although the date for the switch-over is not yet clear. News International’s flagship site at Waltham Cross in north London is due to start full production at the start of next summer, while its other plants are already working. Controversially, The Daily Telegraph will be produced there alongside NI’s The Sun and The Times. Daily Mail & General Trust’s new flexo plant at Didcot will be ready to go at some point during the year.

By my reckoning, of the nationals, by the end of 2008 the following will be produced in full colour: The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror – plus their Sunday sister titles. The Daily Telegraph’s move out of West Ferry has no set date, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was before the end of the year.

The obvious titles missing here – in our race metaphor, I think it’s fair to call them stragglers – are those primarily printed at West Ferry in Docklands. The Daily Express, The Star and The Sport have, at least publicly, no set plans to make their newspapers full-colour. The question mark over West Ferry now that the Telegraph is pulling out hangs heavy, and it is anyone’s guess what Richard Desmond, who of course owns 50% of the plant, plans to do with it.

I do wonder, though, what the real benefit of winning this race has been. The Guardian’s circulation hasn’t had the massive boost it might have hoped for, and I don’t get the impression that ad revenues have shot up as a result of being able to offer colour ads on every page. So does printing full-colour guarantee a lucrative yellow jersey for a newspaper? Or is spending all that cash with MAN Roland, KBA, Goss and the rest just a question of keeping up with the pack?

Finally, merry Christmas and a prosperous 2008 to you all.

Although print is all around us, it’s nevertheless an invisible industry. I had never seriously considered how printed materials were produced or where they came from until I applied for a job at PrintWeek several years ago – and I don’t think I’m unusual in that.

So making young people aware that there is an industry out there with interesting career paths is absolutely crucial. It’s therefore an all-round Good Thing (with deliberate capital letters) that HP and The Landscape Group have started up their Eduprint initiative. (For more on this, see today’s PrintWeek.)

It’s just more fuel to get kids interested in printing, and given that it seems to be targeted at primary schools, it should dovetail nicely with the PrintIT! scheme being run by ProSkills, which is part of the GCSE curriculum.

We occasionally hear of school visits to printers in various bits of the country, and these should be encouraged. And that’s not to mention the Newspaper Education Trust at West Ferry, which introduces children to journalism but in the context of it being in one of Europe’s biggest print factories (let’s hope it stays that way). I’m sure there are dozens of other small initiatives around the country.

All of this is fantastic, and the more it happens, the better it will be for the industry and its image. There’s always room for more, but we should applaud what is happening already.