CITY OF INDUSTRY, Calif. — Newspapers can’t cut their way to prosperity and instead must find novel ways to regain their circulation and advertising footing, attendees at a June Flint Group-sponsored seminar were told.

“Newspapers are under great stress,” said Norm Harbin, vice president of business and technical development at Flint Group as he addressed the group. “What are things we can do to transform newspapers and get back to prosperity?” Harbin said. “You can’t cut your way there.”

Niko Ruokosuo, managing director of Finnish publisher Sanoma, cited the blossoming of civic journalism and the rise of free newspapers in Europe as prime ingredients fueling newspaper growth overseas.

“Getting to young readers is a must,” he said, adding that publishers should take a page from automaker BMW, which transformed itself from utilitarian to cutting-edge.

Case in point: Metro, the free daily. Ruokosuo said Metro has aggressively wooed readers and advertisers by taking such unorthodox steps as allowing advertising to bleed into editorial content and printing front-page ads that occupy a majority of the page.

Editorial departments at U.S. newspapers have fiercely resisted any approach to blur the line between advertising and editorial, he conceded, but as newspaper industry economic pressures continue to build, it’s a discussion that must be held.

All together now

“Marketing, editorial, sales, prepress, production, distribution, all of these departments have to work together and reinvent how they do business,” Ruokosuo, a former Los Angeles Times’ production manager, said.

“This will enable the creation of new products that have a multipronged approach that all departments understand.”

The bi-annual Newspaper Quality Improvement Technical Meeting also showcased steps taken by Dow Jones to standardize operations across its U.S. print facilities, with Paul Cousineau, director of national production, saying that continuous improvement projects initiated in 2000 are now bearing fruit.

“For us, our paper must look the same, regardless of the plant. The process” — anchored by Six Sigma and other continuous improvement strategies — “has been very successful,” he said.

To that end, each DJ plant uses the same consumables and employs common press settings that ensure that machines start up and print the same way. DJ also adopts printing standards such as SNAP and the PDF/X-1a to guarantee consistency.

New tricks

The publisher is also experimenting with new production technologies such as scented inks in an effort to woo advertisers.

“The bottom line is that they work,” Cousineau said of the technique, developed by Valhalla, N.Y.-based Scentisphere and Flint (see Newspapers & Technology, April 2007).

The Flint seminar also gave attendees a glimpse into the forthcoming 2008-2010 International Newspaper Color Quality Club competition, the winners of which will be announced at Nexpo 2008 in Washington, D.C.

Mike Brady, the Newspaper Association of America’s director of production operations, said the INCQC made a few changes for the upcoming competition, including the establishment of a “jury of peers” to review submitted copies. The deadline for papers that wanted to enter the competition was last month.