Press Minding - All the news that’s fit for print

November 2007 - Posts

• printweek.com busts records, again

  The printweek.com website has been on an upward trajectory for much of this year, but November is the first month that printweek.com has broken the dual milestones of 300,000 page impressions and 50,000 unique users.   In March of this year, the month before we launched the new printweek.com site, the audience was 21,808. So in eight months, our uniques figure has rocketed nearly 130%.   What's interesting is that PrintWeek is the 800lb gorilla of a brand for the UK print industry with an enormous profile and reach. In short, everyone who is anyone in print knows about PrintWeek.   Each week the magazine goes out to 17,000 decision makers within the print industry. Now printweek.com reaches three times as many. The brand has never reached so many people as it does today.   So where have all these extra readers come from? Well there is a degree of international usage that makes up around 30% of printweek.com readers, but the lion's share remains UK.   Let's call that 35,000 UK readers. According to the BPIF industry body, there are around 160,000 people involved in the UK print industry, so that means that printweek.com is read by 22% of everyone involved in print in this country.   For a website that's aimed at the decision makers in print, that covers all stakeholders, proving that a great website can make a difference.   So, who to thank for this extraordinary eight months? It's pretty simply - it's you, the reader. You have proved that there is a demand in the print industry to break news as it happens and that having your finger on the pulse of the industry is paramount in making intelligent business decisions.   What's next? We want to get you talking to each other, which is why we have the printweek.com community section. We want to know the pain points and opportunities out there, and have the print industry engage these issues through our forums and other features. It's your community, so take part!  Posted Nov 30 2007, 09:27 AM by Matt Whipp with no comments

• A history worth recording

  Norwich - home of Jarrold's - has added a raft of new presses to its print museum, some apparently dating back beyond the 1950s (given the lifespan of a press, it strikes me that that's barely a handful of press generations). The Lord Mayor of Norwich unveiled the new additions at a ceremony at the printer, which has been operating since Napoleonic times.   It struck me that for such a venerable and noble industry, there isn't enough celebration of its history, particularly one that's still romping along, bringing home £15bn a year. What can little ol' printweek.com do? How about if you send us some photos of the more distinguished printing equipment and a little description of what and where it is, we put them online in a new photo gallery dedicated to vintage kit? Send your pics to us at editorial@printweek.com and we'll see what we can do.   Posted Nov 29 2007, 04:53 AM by Matt Whipp with no comments

• Kindle to put out the flames of e-readers?

  If I were to devise an electronic device to display books, with the aim of putting off anyone from ever using e-readers in the future, I know just what it would look like: Amazon's Kindle. I know nothing, OK, so I am in no position to comment, but this is my show, and to me it looks like a Fisher Price version of the scientific calculators I used to get through Maths GCSE in the 1980s. This is a public product, like a phone, a book, a magazine. You use it in public and it makes a statement about you. The Kindle statement reads something like: "I'm with stupid", but it's ironically self-referential. The electronic paper display I like. It's not tiring to look at unlike the TFT screens of a laptop. So that's my one concession to otherwise blanket hatred. What else to hate? The price. It comes in at about £200, then Kindle books average around £5, according to reports, and you have to pay for stuff you'd normally get for free, like online news, blogs; even your own documents such as Word files will cost you to open on a Kindle. There's a reason for this. Amazon is using a 3G mobile phone network (using the EVDO standard if you must know) and it's not free, so while Amazon won't charge you a monthly "line rental" charge, it has to recoup that cost some how. Fortunately, we're nowhere near getting an EVDO cellular network in Blighty, so book printers, rest easy. But it could be done with a half decent rollout of WiMAX (it would be cheaper too). Now let's have at least one objective dispassionate perspective on all this. And this is that although everything's turning into bits and bytes, life is not binary. There isn't going to be a watershed moment where no-one picks up a printed book again. But conversely the failure (if it happens) of Kindle will not be the end of e-readers. Both will find their balance in the way we consume newspapers, magazines, books and so on. What the Kindle won't find though is its way into my bag. Should you have jumped the gun and actually bought a Kindle, can I recommend the following 21 Dog Years: doing time at Amazon. But the MOST gratifying thing about this rant, is that I am not alone. You see, if you haven't done so already, head on over to Amazon's Kindle page; it has already received 266 reviews, with an average of 2.5 stars out of 5. Kindle is hardly on fire by anyone's standard.     Posted Nov 20 2007, 03:21 AM by Matt Whipp with 4 comment(s)

• To take a stand or a standard?

  The Guardian Print Centre's engineering manager Danny Couchman kindly took printweek.com around its incredible Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-esque facility. It was clearly the equivalent of Disneyland to an engineer like Danny, whose enthusiasm was only dampened by the fact he'd like to get even more work through those towers. And it all boiled down to the Guardian's decision to move to the Berliner format. As brand, it was a canny move, in making a quality more physically accessible, without moving to tabloid and the downmarket associations. It's great to stand out from the competition as a brand, but it's a tough call when you're running a press in a newspaper industry with declining circulations and a format few others use. We live in a world where standardisation creeps inexorably into every facet of industry, but hats off to the Guardian for having the stomach to do otherwise          Posted Nov 13 2007, 02:22 AM by Matt Whipp with no comments

• It started with a colour

  Oce kindly invited printweek.com out to its home of Venlo to celebrate 130 years - quite a venerable age for any company and especially worth celebrating for a company that turned a profit in all but one of those years. Birthday talk was built on buzz words promoting the consistent pursuit of best-in-class products. BT head honch Ben Verwaayen delivered a compelling speech on how any company's brilliant talent is increasingly under pressure from upstarts, from brilliant minds in economies coming online that can now participate, compete and upturn an industry in pretty quick time. But what also came out of the day was not how success is achieved with persistent and consistent high performance, but how a single decision, even within the lifespan of century-old companies, define their fate. Oce started in 1877 with a colour. "That delicious yellow colour" as described by our hostess at the event (since when was a colour "delicious"?) was a chemical creation by founder Lodewijk van der Grinten that turned the pallid grease of margerine into a buttery delight. But it wasn't the undaunted dedication of our hero in creating this lurid dye on which Oce's success was built. As with many histories of men written by men, it was not a central male character that changed its fate. It was a single decision by van der Grinten's wife, without which the yellow wealth may have lasted but a generation or two. Instead of just selling the recipe, as Lodewijk wished, his wife persuaded him to patent it, securing licensing revenues for years to come. That single decision made the company. BT's Verwaayen used the success of Samsung to highlight how what we call a global stage is becoming more and more, well, global. But even these anecdotes could be boiled down to destiny-changing decisions. Before 1988, Samsung was a no-name brand from a country the rest of the world knew little about and considered with no small amount of reserve and distrust. And then along came the Olympics and the world's interest in all things Korea spiked. And just before that Samsung made a decision and took a risk. It gambled all its marketing on that Olympics, and a global brand was born. So, yes, hard work, commitment, looking at the long term game are all worth celebrating, but a single well-timed decision to take a risk can multiply that hard graft a hundred fold. Cake anyone?      Posted Nov 01 2007, 05:02 AM by Matt Whipp with no comments