The days where advertising pays for everything at a newspaper are long gone. Instead, publishers are seeking alternative revenue streams, ranging from commercial printing to the creation of discrete online offerings.

But even as papers search for new ways to bolster their bottom lines, they are also beginning to investigate the potential within one of their most essential departments: postproduction.

As industry consultant Alan Flaherty said at August’s Inland Press Association postpress and hybrid printing seminar, how effectively newspapers oversee postpress and distribution could determine their future.

“The industry is at a cusp of change,” he said. “Newspapers should now be thinking of themselves as distributors of information; not necessarily just printers of that information.”

Shoring up

Many papers have already taken steps to shore up their postpress operations, equipping them with more sophisticated and faster machines capable of meeting increased microzoning and inserting requirements.

They’re also stitching their postpress to prepress and press operations, using software as the bridge over which a single set of instructions can flow from one department to the other.

All you have to do is walk through plants in Salt Lake City, Kansas City, Mo., Detroit and Louisville, Ky., to get a sense of what the future might hold.

 

But you can also look in Lafayette, Ind., and Rome, Ga., to see how smaller-circulation papers are using polywrapping to make their products more attractive. And you’ll see the same thing in other mid-market distribution centers in Wilmington, Del., and Champaign, Ill., over the next several months.

Meantime, vendors are rolling out enhancements to their product lines. Ferag, for example, plans to tout technology that will allow users to increase the capacity of their postpress machines without increasing the machines’ footprints. Cannon is working on RFID technology that will let newspapers track inserts using radio waves instead of barcode readers. And software vendors are racing to upgrade their mailroom control apps to mesh with the forthcoming Vista OS release from Microsoft in order to give their customers additional operational benefits.

Goal in mind

The goal: to enable the newspaper to be its community’s primary source of news and advertising, capitalizing on its role as local information provider.

Want more proof that postpress’ star has risen in the corporate firmament?

One of the speakers at the Inland seminar was an IBM consultant who was invited to talk about how newspapers should employ such corporately worshipped management practices as lean manufacturing and Six Sigma to their postproduction departments.

When you see Master Black Belt Six Sigmas strolling around your inserters, you know postpress has arrived.