Editor’s note: Ifra’s Extreme Study Tour visits newspapers around the world to understand how they operate and to discuss their respective challenges and opportunities. In this installment editors from Ifra’s newspaper techniques wrote about news-gathering operations in Poland and Germany.

Circulation: Gazeta Wyborcza

Amid an increasingly competitive market and recession, in 2003 Poland national daily Gazeta Wyborcza rolled up its sleeves, focused on good journalism and promoted its image. The result? A 21 percent circulation leap.

In 2003 Germany’s Axel Springer launched a new bild-style tabloid in a Polish market suffering from two years of serious recession.

Until then, Polish newspapers generally didn’t need to do much to promote themselves.

With the arrival of Springer’s Fakt, however, there was suddenly an imminent threat. The country’s largest national quality newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, owned by Agora, entered the battle determined not to be defeated. Since then, its circulation has increased by 21 percent. The recipe: high-quality journalism and a passionate public service mentality.

Price war

Before the entry of Fakt, the price for a Polish newspaper two years ago was about 2 zloty (60 cents). Local papers had a strong position with a market share of 52 percent (mostly single-copy sales.) There was only one national tabloid, which with a circulation of 274,000 had a 12 percent market share. Gazeta Wyborcza had 16 percent share and a circulation of 410,000.  

Enter Axel Springer, launching a tabloid sold for 1 zloty (30 cents) and with a national advertising campaign to boot - something virtually unheard of in the Polish newspaper business.

There was no time to be complacent.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s main concern was not losing its readers - it was, after all, a quality newspaper and not in direct competition for tabloid readers - but losing its position among the advertisers. Initially, the newspaper defended its position through regular advertising, mainly on TV, focusing on the value of the brand and the newspaper’s mission.

Promotional power

The editorial product was improved through new supplements such as comics, crossword puzzles and car magazine Top Gear, all of which were promoted on TV.

Still, “This was not enough,” said Gazeta Wyborcza Marketing Manager Anna Bogdanska. “Our circulation was not dropping substantially, but Fakt was growing theirs, and the distance between us was increasing. Our answer was to create a new promotional team made up of both people from the editorial promotion side and the marketing side to see what could be done.”

A number of improvements to the product ensured. Editorially, it stressed writing extensively about social interest topics. “We are a young and very dynamic democracy, laws change constantly and people are anxious about how they will be affected - Gazeta Wyborcza clearly has a role to play in helping explain events in this area,” Bogdanska said.

Quality inserts

The paper also launched quality inserts, such as a weekly culinary book of the world with recipes; atlases; booklets commemorating John Paul II; and other products.

Sometimes CDs or DVDs are included on topics such as how to calculate personal income tax or how to prepare a presentation for secondary school final exams.

“The newspaper supports all these circulation promotions with a serious engagement in public life,” Bogdanska said. “We are trying to tackle what you could call defects of the democracy. The newspaper has, for example, published a set of criteria for what constitutes a good school, which schools nationally are trying to reach. There is also an anti-corruption program aimed at finding the best local authorities and so on.”

The result of a year and a half of these efforts to promote Gazeta Wyborcza is that average circulation rose 21 percent, to 496,000 during the second quarter of the year. Although the paper still trails Fakt’s 525,000 circ, other competitors have lost about 15 percent of their subscribers.

More important, Gazeta Wyborcza has maintained its leading position as the advertiser vehicle of choice.

New plant: Rheinisch-Bergische Druckerei

In 2001 Germany’s Rheinisch-Bergische Druckerei (Dusseldorf) modernized its printing center with completely new equipment and software that not only helped reach its goal of industrialized production, but also made its customers active participants in its production and quality control.

Thanks to new presses, imaging devices, mailroom equipment, production control systems and a nearly automated workflow, today Rheinisch-Bergische Druckerei (RBD) offers 20 percent more technical capacity in a seven-day week compared to 2001 in a six-day week, said Matthias Tietz, business manager and senior executive of the company.

Tietz said the company’s number of personnel dropped from more than 350 in 1999 to just 250 in 2005 and he expects it to be further reduced in the future.

“Our strategy to further automate the printing plant in a phased operation” said Tietz. “This applies equally for both technology and processes and naturally for the ability of our personnel to work optimally in an industrialized production process. This strategy has enabled our main customer and shareholder, Rheinisch Post (RP) to offset the crises experienced throughout the industry. At the same time, with our newly acquired customers we have had in part to develop or redefine, respectively, our consciousness for quality, the customers and customer loyalty.”

RBD prints 450,000 copies of RP each weekday and also prints an additional 1.3 million other newspapers each week.

Presses fuel expansion

With the introduction of three Koenig & Bauer Commander satellite printing presses in 2001, RBD instantly attained a high level of color flexibility. The machines are controlled by nine VDU consoles using job scheduling and press presetting systems. Computer-to-plate functionality is provided by two Polaris 200 and three Polaris 150 systems from Agfa, giving the company a production capacity of 800 plates per hour.

Postpress operations are anchored by five inserting and packaging systems from Ferag.

Linking it all together is VIP plant management software from EAE, which communicates with Ferag and ABB MPS software on the press.

Standard networking is employed in the printing and mailroom areas for RP as well as for other customers, providing high levels of automation and process reliability.

“We consider it important that the networking should not be an ‘island’ in the printing plant, but instead should extend to the customer in terms of systems, organization and quality management,” Tietz said. “The activities of our production control experts today reach into the house of RP customers, where together with the customer they optimize processes and interfaces. This ensures a continuous further improvement of process and quality results.”