CHICAGO - Postproduction is ready to take center stage.

As newspapers continue to search for ways to forge new revenue streams, distribution and packaging are attracting a lot of interest by publishers and production executives.

“Mailrooms are being turned upside down,” said Bill Bolger, vice president of production at The Indianapolis Star, at Inland Press Association’s press and mailroom seminar.

Twin forces of burgeoning insert volume, combined with more stringent verification of insert performance by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, are forcing a sea of change in mailroom operation, Bolger said.

Left, John Richards, director of newspaper product management for Goss, and right, Travis Komidar, operations director for the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, Ind., were among the speakers at Inland Press Association’s seminar.

“There is now a lot of attention and time being spent toward audits,” he said. “We will ultimately wind up with grades in the mailroom.”

The other trend transforming distribution is the production and packaging of niche and commercial products beyond the core newspaper. As more dailies upgrade their press and production platforms, they are out searching for additional commercial accounts to keep their machines operating around the clock.

 

More money

Case in point: Gannett Co. Inc.’s Rockford (Ill.) Register star, which in the first 12 months following the commissioning of its Koenig & Bauer AG Colora press will post more than $1 million in commercial revenue from the production of niche products.

Gannett will be paying more attention to postpress, especially now that it’s wrapped up other major press projects in Detroit, New York state and Lafayette, Ind.

“Accountability is key,” said J. Austin Ryan, Gannett’s vice president of production. “We need to secure advertising accuracy across the board.”

Indeed, said Alan Flaherty, principal of ComPlan Associates in Cincinnati, postpress might be the newspaper industry’s salvation.

“The industry is at a cusp of change,” he said, adding that, for many newspapers, insert revenues now account for more than half of their advertising income.

“Newspapers should now be thinking of themselves as distributors of information; not necessarily just printers of that information,” he said.

To that end, newspapers have to be able to saturate their markets with information, news and advertising content, Flaherty said. And that requires robust production and postproduction facilities.

“The concept of mass media is all but gone,” he said. “Papers now must rely on a non-subscriber supplement to get their message across, and preparing and distributing that is the best tool to obtain penetration.”

More capabilities

At the same time, postproduction technology continues to blossom, with more efficient, automated and speedy equipment available from vendors.

Modern inserters can easily handle all types of marketing materials, from FSIs to shampoo samples. The advent of smarter software and low-priced variable printing, meantime, has made it possible to personalize newspaper bundles and related materials, Flaherty said.

“The efficiencies of press technology aren’t as great as the potential of zoned inserting,” he said, with the ultimate goal the possibility of address-specific delivery of inserts tailored to individual households.

“Packaging frees newspapers from legacy constraints.”

Papers say they’re moving to respond. The Chicago Tribune, for example, has budgeted millions of dollars to upgrade its postpress infrastructure even as the publisher takes steps elsewhere to reduce expenditures.

“Advertisers want the Tribune to help them maximize their ROI,” said Larry Rutherford, manager of production planning and control.

“They want us to translate their dollars into people” seeing their message.

In response, newspapers have to be more efficient and leaner in their postpress operations in order to provide the services necessary, he said.

More control

“We’ve invested in hardware and software to permit even finer zoning and to track our processes,” Rutherford said, adding that the paper’s 11 production planning, production and warehouse apps have been meshed to allow managers to monitor postproduction from insert to delivery.

The Tribune is also one of some 50 papers that signed up to participate in the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Insert Verification Service, which authenticates how well papers delivered their Sunday inserts to subscribers (see Newspapers & Technology, February 2006).

The Tribune, which handles more than 2.5 billion inserts each year, delivered 98.7 percent of its inserts correctly during its test, ABC said.

Vendors, meantime, are gearing up to support newspapers’ needs, offering machines and software that are more intuitive and more automated.

One challenge: bridging the gap between the machinery and the control software needed to operate postpress devices.

“Many inserters might have another 20 years’ of life,” said Judah Holstein, president of Miracom Computer Corp. “But the software and the controls needed to manage those machines change dramatically” and must offer such capabilities as browser-based operations and real-time reporting.

More demands

At the same time, Holstein said, the lifespan of major OS releases is shrinking. While DOS reigned supreme for more than a dozen years, Windows XP will be succeeded by Vista in 2007, less than six years after the former was introduced.

The added functionality in new OS apps makes it necessary for newspapers to upgrade their software if they want to capitalize on new automation and efficiency features, Holstein said.

The advent of bigger insert packages is leading other vendors, including GMA Inc., Goss International Corp. and Quipp Systems Inc., to retool inserter feeders and conveyors and other components to handle the additional volume.

In a nod to newspapers producing more commercial work, Gammerler Corp. said it plans to roll out a new stacker that has the capacity to handle a variety of products, regardless of page count. The ZL stacker, based on Gammerler’s KL6000 stacker, is already in use at European and Asian newspapers, and will be released in the United States in 2007.